A selection of recent art and photography books on Asia

A number of books published in the past year offer a fascinating array of vintage photographs, some dating from the earliest days of photography, many being presented to the public for the first time, to delight the contemporary viewer. In Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs (Archipelago/University of Hawai'i Press, $55 ), Australian businessman Scott Merrillees sets out to reconstruct what nineteenth-century Batavia, as Jakarta was known from 1619 to 1945, looked like. The focus is on the physical layout of the city, and the majority of the photographs, which date from the 1850s to the mid-1890s, are of colonial buildings because, as Merrillees explains, most of the early topographical photographs of Batavia were taken by Europeans for European customers. There are, however, some views of local markets and Chinese shops, houses, and temples. At the beginning of each chapter is a map (dating from 1874-76) on which the location of each of the sites photographed is indicated, and the notes accompanying each photograph explain not only the history of the site portrayed but also when a building changed hands or was demolished, or, if it is still standing, what it is used for today.
Aesthetics was the determining factor in the selection of the photographs that appear in India through the Lens: Photography 1840-1911 (Prestel, $80), published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name held at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. in early 2001. It includes works by both Indian and Western (mainly British) photographers. Among the notable images are John Murray's photographs and waxed paper negatives of the Taj Mahal dating from the early 1860s, a four-part panorama of Elphinstone Circle, Bombay, by an unknown photographer dating from ca. 1870, Felice Beato's photographs commemorating the events of 1857-58 in Lucknow, the lush architectural and landscape photographs by Lala Deen Dayal (1844-1910), and the elegant portraits in the chapter entitled "India of the Princes and Maharajas."
Another photographic survey, Singapore: A Pictorial History, 1819-2000, by Gretchen Liu (Archipelago/Tuttle, $50), contains more than twelve hundred images, most of them from the National Archives of Singapore and the Singapore History Museum. As the title suggests, the emphasis is not so much on the photographs (and the drawings, paintings, and prints from the early days) themselves as on the history of the city. However, there is much here that will appeal to those with an interest in the history of photography. The author and publisher have done a great service by taking on such an ambitious project and making these images-which include colonial buildings in the 1860s, the city's Chinatown in the 1870s, family portraits dating from the 1920s, and the Japanese forces entering Singapore in 1942-more widely available. Although the sheer number of images makes the book somewhat unwieldy and the lack of information about the photographers is disappointing, nowhere else can one find such a comprehensive collection in one volume.

Gandhi: A Photo Biography by Peter Ruhe (Phaidon, $39.95) traces the life of Mahatma Gandhi through nearly three hundred photographs, from his childhood in India and his student days in London to his work in South Africa and his return to India to lead the struggle for Indian independence. The photographs, many published here for the first time, come from two main sources: the collection of Gandhi biographer Vithalbhai Jhaveri, and that of Gandhi's great nephew Kanu Dandhi, who lived with Gandhi for the last twelve years of his life and was the only person Gandhi allowed to photograph him on a regular basis. They include intimate family portraits, as well as photographs of the more public, historical events that shaped the times in which he lived and continue to shape the world today.

On a more contemporary note, Daniel Schwartz's The Great Wall of China (Thames & Hudson, $39.95) is a collection of black-and-white photographs taken on numerous journeys, beginning in the 1980s to one of the world's most stupendous manmade constructions. Schwartz has done what many have only dreamed of doing: he followed the wall (actually, a series of sections built over a period of two thousand years), and photographed it from one end to the other. Coordinates of latitude and longitude are given for each photograph so that one can place the site on the map at the front of the book; however, it would have been helpful if the map had included a few place names, making it easier for readers to picture where sections of the wall are located in relationship to modern geographic entities.
Fruits (Phaidon, $29.85) is a photography book of an entirely different sort. It is a collection of colorful portraits taken from a magazine of the same name that was established in 1994 by photographer Shoichi Aoki. Aoki set out to record the zany fashions of young people in Tokyo, who parade the streets in the Harakuju section of the city, donning extraordinary combinations of clothing in a reaction to the "submissive acceptance of designer style." The humor in the photographs (there is almost no text) and the many details in the psychedelic combinations of colors and fabrics, hairdos and accessories make this a book you will continue to enjoy each time you return to it.
Ikiro / Be Alive: Contemporary Art from Japan, 1980 until Now (Kr?ller-M¨¹ller Museum/Hotei, $39.95) is the catalogue for an exhibition held in Otterlo, The Netherlands, in the summer of 2001 that featured the works of eighteen contemporary Japanese artists, presented in order of seniority, from Ufan Lee and Isamu Wakabayashi, both born in 1936, to Tabaimo, born in 1975. As curator of the show and editor of the catalogue Jaap Bremer explains, the selection of artists was somewhat arbitrary; but the catalogue gives an excellent overview of Japanese art during the past twenty years. Among the works included are sculptures hewn from tree trunks with axle, chisel, and circular saw by Shigeo Toya, room-size installations incorporating a variety of everyday objects by Toshihiro Kuno, stills from a Mariko Mori DVD, and the calligraphic performance art of Takahiro Suzuki from which the exhibition takes its name.

Two books published in the past year are devoted to the work of Japanese-born artists who reside in the United States. Yes Yoko Ono (Harry N. Abrams, $60), edited by Alexandra Munroe, director of New York's Japan Society Gallery, and Jon Hendricks, Yoko Ono's curator and archivist, was published in conjunction with an exhibition that originated at the Japan Society and is now traveling to a number of North American museums. The lavishly illustrated, 350-page volume takes a serious, exhaustive look at the contributions of the artist better known as John Lennon's widow, whose work in film, music, and performance art, as well as the visual arts, makes her difficult to categorize. In addition to the many essays on different aspects of her artistic career, the book includes a detailed chronology, an extensive bibliography, and a CD. Jun Kaneko, who was born in Nagoya in 1942 and has lived in the United States since the 1960s (with frequent visits to Japan), is the subject of an in-depth study, Jun Kaneko by Susan Peterson (Weatherhill, $40). Kaneko is best known for his large-scale, brightly colored, glazed ceramic pieces-some eleven feet high and weighing more than five and a half tons-called "dangos" (the Japanese word for a kind of small rounded dumpling), which are often exhibited in groups or as part of larger installations. Like his smaller works, they are covered with lines, dots, and spirals and reveal Kaneko's early training as a painter, his fascination with the relationship between patterns, surface, and form, and his interest in scale.

Four of the most impressive art books of the past year were published in conjunction with major exhibitions of Chinese art. Three of them provide information about previously overlooked areas of Chinese art history, and one presents artifacts from a recently excavated area that has changed long-held conceptions about Chinese civilization.
Taoism and the Arts of China edited by Stephen Little with Shawn Eichman (University of California Press, $60 hardcover, $39.95 paperback) was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that appeared at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. The book explores the relationship between Taoism and Chinese art from the late Han period (second century), which is when scholars have traditionally thought the transformation of Taoism from a philosophy to a religion occurred, to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), in an attempt to make both the history and current practice of Taoism better understood in the West, where it has received far less attention than either Buddhism or Confucianism. It includes essays by Patricia Ebrey, Kristofer Schipper, Nancy Schatzman Steinhardt, and Wu Hung, as well as a catalogue of the exhibition.
Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits by Jan Stuart and Evelyn S. Rawski (Stanford University Press, $75 hardcover, $39.95 paperback) was published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery last summer. The book tells the fascinating story of how, in 1991, the gallery acquired a collection of eighty-five Ming- and Qing-dynasty portraits, many of members of the imperial family, from an eccentric New Mexico rancher. Because portraits were traditionally regarded as objects for ritual veneration, and because the figures were often painted posthumously according to rather rigid conventions-their makers considered artisans rather than artists-portraiture was long a neglected area of study in both China and the West. Chapters are devoted to such topics as the history of portraiture in China, the visual conventions used, and the identity of the sitters.
Between Two Cultures: Late-Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Wen C. Fong (Yale University Press, $65) deals with another neglected area of study, Chinese painting from the 1860s, when artists from all over China were drawn to Shanghai to cater to the newly wealthy middle class there, until the 1980s, when Chinese artists joined the ranks of the international avant-garde. The erudite text (Dr. Fong is both Douglas Dillon Curator Emeritus of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy at the museum and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University) poses the question of what is modern in Chinese painting-influences from the West, or reinterpretations of Chinese tradition. Among the artists included in the discussion are Xu Beihong, Fu Baoshi, Qi Baishi, and Zhang Daqian.

Ancient Sichuan: Treasures from a Lost Civilization, edited by Robert Bagley (Princeton University Press, $60) was published to coincide with the exhibition "Treasures from a Lost Civilization: Ancient Chinese Art from Sichuan," which opened at the Seattle Art Museum in May 2001 and over the next year will travel to Fort Worth, New York, and Toronto. Most of the bronze, stone, and clay objects, dating from the thirteenth century BCE to the third century, come from an ancient city located near the present-day village of Sanxingdui, some forty kilometers from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. As Dr. Bagley states in his preface, until the discovery of this site in 1986, "archaeologists had no reason to suppose that pre-Qin Sichuan was anything but a wild frontier region waiting to receive the blessings of civilization from the more innovative heartland of China." But the discovery and subsequent excavations have turned those views upside down. No longer can Chinese civilization be thought of as having originated in and spread out from the Yellow River valley. Among the objects from Sanxingdui are three bronze heads with masks of gold foil covering their faces, a bronze tree over twelve feet high resting on a dragon base, and a bronze bell in the shape of a bird. A number of clay tomb figures dating from the Han period (25-220), from other sites in Sichuan, are also included, in a chapter by Jessica Rawson.

Another neglected area of study has been addressed in Thai Art and Culture: Historic Manuscripts from Western Collections by Henry Ginsburg, curator of Thai and Cambodian collections at the British Library (University of Hawaii Press, $45). The book contains photographs of a wealth of Thai manuscripts, most from the nineteenth century, which the author explains often survived better in the more temperate climates of the West than in the steamy heat of Thailand. Among them are Buddhist tales-rendered as folding book manuscripts painted on khoi paper, with colorful paired illustrations on either side of the central text-cosmologies, and fortune-telling manuals. The book also includes documents pertaining to Thailand by Westerners, such as a French watercolor of Louis XIV receiving three Thai envoys in 1687, and natural history drawings done by Dr. George Finlayson in 1821 and 1822 (among them a striking painting of a flying squirrel), as well as photographs such as a carte-de-visite of King Mongkut dating from 1868.
Both Tibetan Paintings: The Jucker Collection by Hugo E. Kreijer (Shambhala, $75) and The Bon Religion of Tibet: Iconography of a Living Tradition by Per Kvarene (Shambhala, $65) would be welcome additions to the library of anyone with an interest in Tibetan art. The seventy-two paintings in the Jucker Collection volume date from the late twelfth to the early twentieth century and were chosen from the several hundred Tibetan works in the collection of Swiss research chemist Misha E. Jucker. The images are mostly of wrathful deities, and each is accompanied by a detailed text on its iconography. The Bon Religion of Tibet presents the main characteristics and doctrines of Bon. The informative introduction is followed by explanations of the various deities, each of which is depicted in the magnificent color plates, as well as extremely useful excerpts from ritual and biographical texts, all translated here for the first time.

-Caroline Herrick