Photo by Dan Bibb

“Art and China’s Revolution” by Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian; “How to Read Chinese Paintings” by Maxwell K. Hearn; “The Last Emperor’s Collection” by Willow Chang, Yang Renkai, and David Sensabaugh

Zhang Hongtu Wenda Gu Xu Bing Sotheby’s Sees Strong Sales in Hong Kong Who Is Ai Weiwei? Changing Hue Cheryl McGinnis and Eugene Faba Sigg Collection to Find Permanent Home in China?

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When the economy takes a nosedive, smart newly unemployed kids go back to school. When the job market recovers, they return — with impressive new degrees. Savvy enthusiasts of Chinese art looking to sift through the overheated Asian-art market might wish to follow a similar plan of action: studying the newest crop of scholarly art books now to train their eye for the onslaught of Asian art being exhibited and sold in New York later this month. Since only works of serious import will hold their value in this financial environment, collectors should forgo For Dummies books in favor of those that promise in-depth insights into the vast and ever-growing category of Chinese art.

In a field infamous for flowery, sometimes torturous philosophical titles, Maxwell K. Hearn’s How to Read Chinese Paintings (Yale University Press/the Metropolitan Museum of Art, $25) is a straightforward educational primer with clear aims. Old-school connoisseurship has its critics, but I would argue that this approach attracts people to Chinese art while more theory-based tomes can confuse and alienate them. There is, after all, value in the fundamentals, and any serious student of the field should have a working knowledge of the 36 iconic paintings and calligraphic works that are discussed here. Hearn, a curator of Chinese paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, is a natural teacher, and his book is a kind of personal tutorial. He uses large, detailed illustrations to help the reader "travel" through landscape hand scrolls and appreciate the sequence, the rhythm and even the re-inking of the brush in calligraphy. Two of the works featured are by the venerated artist Ni Zan (1301-74), who despite leading a rootless existence during the turbulent end of the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), painted "virtually the same composition his entire life," according to Hearn. Yet the author’s examination of the subtle variations across the painter’s oeuvre reveal changes in his mind and circumstances and foster a deeper understanding of the ascetic style that make him so beloved.

The Last Emperor’s Collection: Masterpieces of Painting and Calligraphy from the Liaoning Provincial Museum (China Institute, $59), by the curators Willow Chang, Yang Renkai and David Sensabaugh, is a logical 200-level course to follow Hearn’s Chinese paintings 101. This bilingual catalogue accompanied a jewel of an exhibition that opened at the China Institute in New York last autumn and continues at Cincinnati’s Taft Museum in May. Three quarters of a century after China’s final imperial ruler, Pu Yi, was forced to flee the Forbidden City, scattering in his wake hundreds of paintings and works of art amassed over the better part of a millennium, the Liaoning Provincial Museum tracked down many of the lost pieces. (For extra credit, Sensabaugh, the curator of Asian art at the Yale University Art Gallery, recommends viewing Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning 1987 film The Last Emperor, which captures the poignancy of Pu Yi’s downfall.) The book focuses on 23 extraordinary paintings from the Ming and Qing dynasties, enhancing their description with details of their riveting journeys — including, for instance, maps of Pu Yi’s escape route — as well as a discussion of the larger history of imperial collecting. The authors’ breakdown of the imperial collection’s management system and appendix of Qianlong seals (which mark the most sought-after Chinese artworks on the market today) are a bonus for enthusiasts seeking to better understand the footnotes in auction house catalogues.

And if you want to become an outstanding pupil of contemporary Chinese art, no rigorous reading list is complete without Art and China’s Revolution (Yale University Press/Asia Society, $65), authored by the Asia Society director Melissa Chiu and the independent curator Zheng Shengtian. It’s not easy to pin down the Socialist Realist art that came out of the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao in the 1960s. The very notion of art born of a regime that killed thousands of intellectuals presents more than a few paradoxes, not to mention a flood of horrifying memories. Accordingly, the approach of Chiu and Zheng is cautious: Although they do not hesitate to label the era as one of violent unrest, they also do not go into the complicated politics that defined it. Instead they focus on presenting the state-mandated images of beaming Maos and toiling peasants as art worthy of study. In doing so, the authors provide insight into the common root of the polarized contemporary-art scene in China. For while the Cultural Revolution is the shared past that all Chinese artists must confront, their reactions go in vastly different directions. Wenda Gu, for instance, gets as far from the Socialist Realist aesthetic as possible, making installations out of human hair. Others, like Zhang Hongtu, who paints images of Mao on Quaker Oatmeal boxes, parody the overtly political iconography of the Communist Party. The valuable first-person reflections by such artists as Xu Bing and translations of key historical documents gathered by Chiu and Zheng provide more than enough source material for those looking to brush up on the backstory of artists working in China today. 

"Required Reading" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's March 2009 Table of Contents.