Affect and Materiality
Emotion in Chinese Art
Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, and Art Media Resources, Inc., 2025. Hardcover. 412 pages, 14 chapters. Item #45935
ISBN: 9781588861665
This volume brings together leading scholars to investigate how emotions are expressed, mediated, and theorized in the visual arts of China from antiquity to the modern era. Inspired by the “Materiality and Affect: Emotion in Chinese Art” symposium held at the University of Chicago in May 2022, co-editors Jeehee Hong and Wu Hung have compiled these scholarly studies into a new book that deepens and enriches understanding of this important field of study. These essays illuminate the complex interplay between inner experience and external stimulus, exploring topics ranging from the materiality of qing (emotion) to the spatialization of the emotion-realm. Contributors analyze texts, objects, and images to reveal how emotions are not simply personal or ineffable, but are embedded in social, philosophical, and material contexts.
Contributions by:
Ronald Egan, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Anne Feng, Jeehee Hong, Wu Hung, Thomas Kelly, Dorothy Y. Ko, Yuhang Li, Wei-Cheng Lin, Lihong Liu, Michele Matteini, Peter Sturman, Eugene Y. Wang, and Shengqing Wu.
CONTENTS
Introduction by Jeehee Hong and Wu Hung
I. AFFECTIVE OBJECTS
1. Emotions through Mirrors: Some Reflections
by Lothar von Falkenhausen
2. The Sacrificial Body of Moye: Affect and Materiality in the Forging of Wu-Yue Swords
by Dorothy Ko
II. ARCHAEOLOGY AND EMOTION
3. Archaeology of Emotion: Traces of Love in a Seventh-Century BCE Chinese Tomb
by Wu Hung
4. “Alas! How Sad It Is That Your Life Was Truncated”: Affect and Materiality in Li Jingxun’s Tomb
by Wei-Cheng Lin
III. AFFECTIVE IMAGES
5. Affective Fish
by Jeehee Hong
6. The Wailing Cicada: How Did the Monochrome Ink Medium Acquire Its Voice, c. 1330?
by Eugene Wang
IV. AFFECTIVE HANDS
7. What Does Calligraphy Convey? The Calligraphic Thought of Su Shi and Huang Tingjian
by Ronald Egan
8. Emotions Perceived and Effaced in Xu Wei’s Calligraphy
by Peter Sturman
9. Affective Impressions in Biographies of Seal Carvers
by Thomas Kelly
V. IMPERIAL AFFECT
10. Engineering Religious Bliss at the Qing Court: The Jile shijie in Beihai Park
by Yuhang Li
11. The Unfinished Business of Hongli’s Ink Painting
by Michele Matteini
VI. MODERN EUPHORIA
12. Happy Matter: Feng Zikai’s Glass Architecture and the De-lighted Crystalline Illumination
by Lihong Liu
13. Ecstatic Forms: The Modern Art of the Apsarā in Japan and China
by Anne Feng
14. Theater of Emotion: The Affective Face in Republican Visual Culture
by Shengqing Wu
Index
About the Editors and Contributing Authors.
Price: $70.00