Members’ Publications: Alison Hardie
Alison Hardie, An Illustrated Brief History of Chinese Gardens: People, Activities, Culture, New York & Shanghai: SCPG, 2023, 164pp., US$19.95, ISBN 978-1-93836-887-5.
This book, illustrated with many images of Chinese gardens, ancient paintings, block prints, and other artefacts, is a social history of Chinese gardens, focusing on how gardens have functioned and been used in Chinese society through the ages. Apart from the aesthetic or philosophical aspects of Chinese gardens, it discusses how gardens functioned as real estate, how they gave opportunities of employment to skilled artisans, how they opened up outdoor space to both elite and lower-class women, and how they allowed men of different social classes and of different ethnicities to interact and gain mutual benefit; in short, how the existence of gardens exerted an influence on society as a whole. At the same time, the reader can find how the wider society, and even socio-economic changes beyond China’s own borders, had an impact on how gardens in China developed.… Read more ⤻
« Dans la pensée chinoise, la musique est une partie du monde, sinon le monde lui-même en ses manifestations sonores. Œuvre humaine, elle constitue l’essence de la culture, au même titre que l’écriture ou la peinture, mais elle est avant cela l’expression de la nature, voire du 道 dao qui génère les êtres et leur confère leurs normes de fonctionnement cyclique » (préface de Rémi Mathieu). L’ouvrage est ainsi une approche par la voie musicale d’un univers qui s’avère être, à considérer les fondements esthétiques chinois, un véritable entrelacs des arts. Il est aussi fondé sur le constat que la poésie chinoise – à la fois un langage artistique et un langage sur l’art – en révèle des aspects essentiels à une compréhension fine de la pensée musicale et du geste artistique. Dès lors, un tiers de poèmes, un tiers d’illustrations et un tiers de texte théorique et technique, trame tissée d’explicitations directes et brodée d’�!… 
Volume 52, edited by Thomas Fröhlich and Brigit Knüsel Adamec, will be a special volume devoted to Chinese Reflections on the Exile Experience after 1949. China’s 20th century was a century marked by exile. The multifarious experience of exile is arguably one of the salient features of a distinction, as historical periods, between the 19th and 20th century in China.
“Passion, Love, and Qing examines the vitality of Peony Pavilion, the most famous drama in Ming China (1368-1644), through four essays (by Isabella Falaschi, Paolo Santangelo, Tian Yuan Tan, and Rossella Ferrari) and an extensive Glossary of specific terms and expressions related to the representation of emotions and states of mind. It explores the evolution and permanence of the universal message about passion or emotions contained in the language of the play. Written in the late Ming, Peony Pavilion embodies the new trends in the ‘cult of passions’ and new sensibility of the times. It is also a rich intertext of love that both inherits the legacy of earlier literary traditions and influences later amatory literature and theatrical performances.”
