Rethinking the Tenth Century

From one of the world’s leading scholars of Chinese art history, a revelatory account of how the long tenth century witnessed some of the most important changes in Chinese painting

In the standard narrative of Chinese painting, the half century spanning the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907–960 CE) is often considered a transitional period between the art of the Tang and Northern Song dynasties. In this beautifully illustrated book, acclaimed art historian Wu Hung draws on new archaeological evidence and research methods to challenge this perspective, identifying a considerably broader period in which Chinese painting evolved in significant ways.

From the late ninth to the early eleventh century, Chinese painters explored diverse new mediums, subject matter, brushwork, and styles. Wu looks at innovations such as the hanging scroll, which stimulated new compositions in the millennium that followed and became the driving force behind the rise of landscape as the dominant subject of Chinese painting. He identifies broad trends in figure painting across different regions, such as a naturalistic tendency in portraiture, the integration of different genres, and collaborations between court painters. Providing a fuller assessment of landscape painting during this period, he establishes a new foundation for exploring stylistic inventions, architectural contexts, and symbolism.

Panoramic in scope, Rethinking the Tenth Century presents new approaches to Chinese painting and its development at a pivotal moment in its history, going beyond traditional dynastic, geographical, and chronological frameworks to offer a master class in close looking.

Published in association with the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art at Princeton University