Sensuous Surfaces - 9780824833619

Sensous Surfaces is a richly illustrated and in-depth introduction to the visual arts in Ming and Qing dynasty China. Jonathan Hay explores materials and techniques, as well as issues of patronage and taste, which together formed a loose system of informal rules that affected every level of decoration in early modern China, from an individual object to the arrangement of an entire residential interior. By engaging the affective and metaphoric potential of surface, this system guided the production and use of the decorative arts during a period of explosive growth that started in the late sixteenth century and continued until the mid-nineteenth century. This understanding of decorative arts in China made a fundamental contribution to the sensory education of its early modern urban population, and was influential far beyond China's borders.

Sensuous Surfaces is also an elegant meditation on the role of pleasure in the decorative arts. Decoration is often intellectually dismissed as merely pleasurable, but Hay argues that decoration is better understood as a necessary form of art that can fulfil its function only by engaging the human capacity for erotic response.

Featuring numerous colour images of a wide range of early modern Chinese objects and artworks, this book will engage anyone with an interest in decoration or Chinese art.