New Books In Art

Craig Clunas‘s new book explores the significance of members of the imperial clan, or “kings” in Ming China. A king was established in a “state” (guo), and mapping the Ming in terms of guo‘s is a way of mapping Ming space in units that had centers, but not boundaries. (In having many guo‘s, the Ming thus had many centers.) A wonderfully and productively revisionist account of Ming history and its artifacts, Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China (University of Hawaii Press and Reaktion Books, 2013) explores this poly-centric kingly landscape as evidenced by documentary and archaeological traces of material production, while paying special attention to the history of practices that did not leave abundant traces. In doing so, Clunas shifts our attention in several ways. In addition to reorienting our focus to kingly figures in the Ming (an often-overlooked but deeply significant historical group), Screen of Kings also moves us away from the oft-trod historiographical territory of the Jiangnan region