16 Books


oneself, and a mixing pot of diverse populations from literally everywhere around the globe. A British Crown Colony for 155 years, Hong Kong is now ruled by the Chinese Communist Party who continues to threaten its democracy and put its rich legacy at risk. Journalist Vaudine England delves into Hong Kong’s complex history and its people-diverse, multi- cultural, cosmopolitan-who have made this one-time fishing village into the world port city it is today. Rather than a traditional history describing a town led by British Governors or a mere offshoot of a collapsing Chinese empire, the book is a thorough examination of the varied peoples who made Hong Kong. While British traders and Asian merchants had long been busy in the Indian and South East Asian seas, there were many from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds who arrived in Hong Kong, met and married-despite all taboos-and created a distinct community. Many of Hong Kong’s most influential figures during its first century as a city were neither British nor Chinese-they were Malay or Indian, Jewish or Armenian, Parsi or Portuguese, Eurasian or Chindian, or simply, Hong Kongers. England describes those overlooked in history including the opium-traders who built synagogues or churches, ship-owners carrying gold-rush migrants, property tycoons, and more.


Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China by Jing Tsu, Penguin, ISBN 9780141985312, £9.85


China is one of the world’s most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, left behind in the wake of Western technology. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language – a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike – accessible to a globalised, digital world. Te book follows the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese script, and the value-system it represents, to the technological advances that would shape the 20th century and beyond, from the telegram to the typewriter to the smartphone. From the exiled reformer who risked death to advocate for Mandarin as a national language to the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup, generations of scholars, missionaries, librarians, politicians, inventors, nationalists


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thinkers from across the land have begun to challenge this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China’s legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts, and underground films document a pattern of disasters: from past famines and purges to the ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present.


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and revolutionaries alike understood the urgency of their task and its world-shaping consequences.


Red Memory by Tania Branigan, Faber, ISBN 9781783352647, £20


More than 50 years on, the Cultural Revolution’s scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for Te Guardian newspaper, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence. Te book explores the stories of those who are driven to confront the era, fearing or yearning its return.


Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future by Ian Johnson, Allen Lane, ISBN 9780241524947, £25


A documentary filmmaker who spent years uncovering a Mao-era death camp; an independent journalist who gave voice to the millions who suffered through Covid; a magazine publisher who dodges the secret police: these are some of the people who make up Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, a vital account of how some of China’s most important writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to challenge the Chinese Communist Party on its most sacred ground – its monopoly on history. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism’s triumph. Te Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and justify its rule. But in recent years, critical


Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making By Ying-chen Peng, Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300263435, £40


Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), who ruled China from 1861 until her death in 1908, is a subject of fascination and controversy, at turns vilified for her political maneuvering and admired for modernizing China. In addition to being an


astute politician, she was an earnest art patron, and this beautifully illustrated book explores a wide range of objects, revealing how the empress dowager used art and architecture to solidify her rule. Cixi’s art commissions were innovative in the way that they unified two distant conceptions of gender in China at the time, demonstrating her strength and wisdom as a monarch while highlighting her identity as a woman and mother. Artful Subversion examines commissioned works, including portrait paintings and photographs, ceramics, fashion, architecture, and garden design, as well as work Cixi created, such as painting and calligraphy. Te book is a fascinating study of how a powerful matriarch at once subverted and upheld the Qing imperial patriarchy.


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Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s Superpower Future by Chun Han Wang, Little, Brown, ISBN 9781472158512, £25


As a China reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Chun Han Wong has chronicled Xi’s hardline strategy for crushing dissent and his political repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Wong spent five years in Beijing before the Chinese government forced him to leave mainland China in 2019, after which he moved to Hong Kong and continued writing about Xi’s leadership. Now, Wong has drawn on his years of first-hand reporting across China to create a lucid and historically-rooted account of China’s leader, and how he inspires fear and fervor in his party, his nation, and beyond. Te book shatters the many myths and caricatures that shroud one of the world’s most secretive political organisations and its leader. Many observers misread Xi during his early years in power, projecting their own hopes that he would steer China toward more political openness, rule of law, and pro- market economics. Having masked his beliefs while climbing the party hierarchy, Xi has centralised decision-making powers, encouraged a personality cult around himself, and moved toward indefinite rule by scrapping presidential term limits- stirring fears of a return to Mao-style dictatorship. Under Xi, China has challenged Western pre-eminence in global affairs and cast its authoritarian system as a model of governance worthy of international emulation.


The Peking Express


by James Zimmerman, Public Affairs, ISBN 9781541701700, $30


In May 1923, when Shanghai publisher and reporter John Benjamin Powell bought a first-class ticket for the Peking Express, he pictured an idyllic overnight journey on a brand-new train of unprecedented luxury-exactly what the advertisements promised. Seeing his fellow passengers, including mysterious Italian lawyer Giuseppe Musso, a confidante of Mussolini and lawyer for the opium trade, and American heiress Lucy Aldrich, sister-in-law of John D Rockefeller Jr, he knew it would be an unforgettable trip. Charismatic bandit leader and populist rabble rouser Sun Mei-yao had also taken notice of the new train from Shanghai to Peking. On the night of Powell’s trip of a lifetime, Sun launched his plan to make a brazen political statement: he and a thousand fellow bandits descended on the train, capturing dozens of hostages. Aided by local proxy authorities,


the humiliated Peking government soon furiously gave chase. At the bandits’ mountain stronghold, a five-week siege began. Tis book uses new and original research to tell the incredible true story of a clash that shocked the world-becoming so celebrated it inspired several Hollywood movies-and set the course for China’s two-decade civil war.


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The Shape of Time: Korean Art After 1989 edited by Elizabeth Agro, Hyonsoo Woo and Taeyi Kim, Philadelphia Museum of Art, ISBN 9780876333020, £40


Focusing on the work of 33 artists, this volume examines the ways contemporary Korean art reflects the dynamic changes in the country following the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and 1988


Seoul Olympics, when a newly democratic South Korea opened up to the rest of the world and quickly became a key player, both economically and culturally, on the global stage. Among the works featured are complex installations by Do Ho Suh and siren eun young jung; sculptures made from disparate materials by Yeesookyung; embroideries that engage with fraught political issues via covert transactions with embroiderers in North Korea by Kyungah Ham; and paintings of contemporary pop figures made using traditional East Asian techniques by Donghyun Son. Essays by a diverse group of scholars position the works in their historical and socio-political contexts within the accelerated timeline – and resulting compression of past, present, and future – of what has been called Korea’s long 21st century. With artist biographies, an illustrated chronology, and a selected bibliography, this study is the first English-language presentation of this material and is a significant contribution to the interpretation and understanding of contemporary Korean art and culture.


Meiji Modern looks at the


construction of Japan’s


modern state Japan & Korea


Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan Ed by Chelsea Foxwell ad Bradley Bailey, Japanese Art Society of America, ISBN 9780300263572, £40


Tis exhibition catalogue takes a fresh look at the art of Japan’s Meiji era (1868-1912), through a vivid selection of approximately 175 objects drawn from early public and private collections across the United States, including newly discovered prints, photographs, textiles, paintings, and craft objects. Featuring motifs such as the sea and nature, Buddhist deities, contemporary life, and mythical animals, Meiji Modern highlights these themes and their transformation with the introduction of newly imported techniques and materials at the intersection of art, industry, and society. Te Meiji era was a complex period of unprecedented cultural and technological transition that played out in the context of intense global competition. Te objects assembled also document the history of American collections of 19th- century Japanese art. Highlighting the active role of art in the construction of the Japanese nation-state, the works in a variety of mediums capture the hopes and aspirations of Japanese modernisation along with its challenges. Building upon this perspective, essays emphasise modern Japanese artists’ engagement with both European and Asian trends.


Art of Japan: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art


Edited by Felice Fischer and Kyoko Kinoshita, Yale University Press, ISBN 9780876333006, £40


Tis catalogue presents 100 Asian Art Newspaper


highlights of Japanese art from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, dating from the Neolithic period to today. Among them are a temple and a teahouse, acquired in 1928, each the first of its type in an American museum. Te collection is also notable for tea wares, particularly ceramics produced between the 16th and 21st centuries. Te Edo and Meiji periods are especially well represented by a wide range of artworks that include calligraphy, paintings, and prints by such luminaries as Hon’ami Koetsu (1558-1637), Ike Taiga (1723-1776), and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839- 1892). An introductory essay by Felice Fischer illuminates the formation of the museum’s extensive collection of Japanese art, which began with the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition – the event that first opened American eyes to Japanese art and culture. Te naissance of the museum’s exceptional holdings of Japanese ceramics can be traced directly to the Centennial, where General Hector Tyndale acquired more than a hundred examples that he bequeathed to the fledgling museum.


Colours of Kyoto: The Seifu Yohei Ceramic Studio by Shinjya Maezaki ad Sinead Vilbar, Cleveland Masterwork Series, ISBN 9781913875541, £24.95


New volume in the Cleveland Masterwork Series focuses on a studio of important late 19th through early 20th-century Japanese ceramic artists. Tis is the first comprehensive look in English at the Seifu Yohei Ceramic Studio in Kyoto, from the Meiji period (1868 1912) to the mid Showa period (1926 89), the James and Christine Heusinger Collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art as its core material. Te principal essay provides a biography of Seifu Yohei III, the star of the studio and the first ceramicist to be named an Imperial Household Artist, as well as an overview of the studio that contextualises it in the world of literati painting, sencha (steeped green tea) and international trade. A second essay offers a brief history of porcelain production in Kyoto, as well as a discussion of objects produced by the Seifu studio for sencha. Te catalogue of a hundred works examines the wide variety of forms, decorative techniques and glazes that made the studio’s works unique.


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