Transformative Jars: Asian Ceramic Vessels as Transcultural Enclosures (Paperback or Softback)

Grasskamp, Anna

ISBN 10: 1350277479 / ISBN 13: 9781350277472

Published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts 6/27/2024, 2024

About this Item

Transformative Jars: Asian Ceramic Vessels as Transcultural Enclosures.

Seller Inventory # BBS-9781350277472

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Transformative Jars: Asian Ceramic Vessels as Transcultural Enclosures (Paperback or Softback)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts 6/27/2024
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350277479
• ISBN 13: 9781350277472
• Binding: Paperback or Softback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 1 pound
• Book Type: Book

About this title

Synopsis

The term ‘jar’ refers to any man-made shape with the capacity to enclose something. Few objects are as universal and multi-functional as a jar – regardless of whether they contain food or drink, matter or a void, life-giving medicine or the ashes of the deceased. As ubiquitous as they may seem, such containers, storage vessels and urns are, as this book demonstrates, highly significant cultural and historical artefacts that mediate between content and environment, exterior worlds and interior enclosures, local and global, this-worldly and otherworldly realms. The contributors to this volume understand jars not only as household utensils or evidence of human civilizations, but also as artefacts in their own right. Asian jars are culturally and aesthetically defined crafted goods and as objects charged with spiritual meanings and ritual significance. Transformative Jars situates Asian jars in a global context and focuses on relationships between the filling, emptying and re-filling of jars with a variety of contents and meanings through time and throughout space. Transformative Jars brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars with backgrounds in curating, art history and anthropology to offer perspectives that go beyond archaeological approaches with detailed analyses of a broad range of objects. By looking at jars as things in the hands of makers, users and collectors, this book presents these objects as agents of change in cultures of craftsmanship and consumption.

About the Authors

Anna Grasskamp is Lecturer at the School of Art History at University of St Andrews, UK. She is the author of Objects in Frames: Displaying Foreign Collectibles in Early Modern China and Europe (2019) and Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia: Shells, Bodies, and Materiality (2021).

Michael Yonan is Professor of Art History/Alan Templeton Endowed Chair in European Art, 1600–1830 at the University of California at Davis, USA. His research concentrates on eighteenth-century European art, particularly in Central Europe and Scandinavia; on the decorative arts, and on the theory and practice of material culture studies. With Stacey Sloboda he has co-edited Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Local and Global Geographies of Art for Bloomsbury Academic.

Anne Gerritsen is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, UK, and Chair of Asian Art at University of Leiden, Netherlands. At Warwick, she co-directs the Global History and Culture Centre.