Art of the Chinese Picture-Scroll

Shane McCausland is Percival David Professor of the History of Art at SOAS University of London. His many books include The Mongol Century: Visual Cultures of Yuan China, 1271–1368 (Reaktion Books, 2014), and he has curated numerous exhibitions in Europe, North America and China.

"Exploring its extraordinary longevity and its adaptability to social, political and technological change, the first extended history of the picture-scroll, China's pre-eminent aesthetic format of the last two millennia." - Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller"Shane McCausland traces the evolution of picture-scrolls from 221 BCE to contemporary practice . . . McCausland’s book offers a fresh perspective on the Chinese picture-scroll, adopting an interdisciplinary approach that moves beyond the conventional focus on style. Instead, he explores the relationship between imagery and text and the broader context of material culture, considering the visual and physical impact of the works on viewers and their reception in society with the aim to understand how these works functioned over time." - Lin Sun, The Burlington Magazine"Lavishly illustrated and lucidly expounded, this is the first book that extols the remarkable potentiality of the handscroll format in Chinese painting. Covering a wide timespan of more than fifteen hundred years, the book demonstrates how the format can foster multiple perspectives and stimulate thoughts on the historiography, materiality, and affective affordances of Chinese painting." - Cheng-hua Wang, Associate Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University"McCausland’s thoughtfully considered and well-researched book offers an innovative approach to reframing the history of the handscroll or the horizontal scroll, a format that is beloved in the long history of East Asian art. His scholarship creates an intellectual space to explore the meanings and parameters the physical object has inherently imposed on art-making over its long history. By focusing exclusively on the history of the handscroll and the unique formal qualities of its physicality, McCausland explores the implications of its form to address the ways in which artists across history have exploited the format to invent and reinvent painting and other works of art." - Roslyn Lee Hammers, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, University of Hong Kong"The Chinese handscroll is globally one of the longest-lasting of all pictorial formats, and this imaginative exploration of its role as both image and object, based on a wide range of sensitively chosen examples, is a major advance in interpretation; it has something to say to everyone interested in pictures and their place in the world." - Craig Clunas, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art and Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, University of Oxford"Eruditely written . . . a welcome addition to the corpus of studies on Chinese painting, written by a scholar deeply immersed in the subject and well able to share his knowledge with the reader in an engaging and lively way." - Nick Pearce, Professor and Richmond Chair of Fine Arts, University of Glasgow

• IntroductionChapter One On Origins and Uses over the First MillenniumChapter Two Inscribing the Artist and the Collector: The Picture-Scroll in the Song-Liao-Jin PeriodChapter Three Handscrolls in Mongol PalacesChapter Four Musing on Shadows: Reading the Ming Picture-ScrollChapter Five Qing: Reading the 'Baroque' HandscrollChapter Six Modernist Uses of the Chinese Picture-ScrollChapter Seven The Medium of Silent Poetry in the Late Modern WorldReferencesFurther ReadingAcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsIndex