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Transformative Jars

Asian Ceramic Vessels as Transcultural Enclosures

Anna Grasskamp Dr Anne Gerritsen

$170

Hardback

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English
Bloomsbury Visual Arts
29 December 2022
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.
Edited by:   ,
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 234mm,  Width: 156mm, 
ISBN:   9781350277434
ISBN 10:   1350277436
Series:   Material Culture of Art and Design
Pages:   296
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

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). Anne Gerritsen is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, UK, and Chair of Asian Art at University of Leiden, Netherlands. She is the author of Ji’an Literati and the Local (2007), and The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (2020). At Warwick, she co-directs the Global History and Culture Centre.

Reviews for Transformative Jars: Asian Ceramic Vessels as Transcultural Enclosures

This fascinating, multidisciplinary collection of essays on ceramic jars from, and in, global contexts illuminates ceramic trade, consumption, production and reception through the lens of a single form, demonstrating the agency of vessels as both containers and cultural objects. * Stacey Pierson, Reader in the History of Chinese Ceramics, SOAS, University of London, UK * A brainstorm of a book, with scholars from a wide range of different fields, Transformative Jars gathers fresh studies on Asian ceramics. It not only totally reshapes our ideas on these most common and practical vessels but also greatly contributes to the interdisciplinary nature of material culture studies. * Ching-fei Shih, Professor, Graduate Institute of Art History, National Taiwan University, Taiwan *


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