Survey books present a unique set of challenges: how to justify what is most important and give adequate attention to everything else that must be covered; how to balance discussion of one's primary research subjects with those about which an author is knowledgeable mainly through secondary literature; when to express a theory or idea, particularly a personal one; and determination of the appropriate length for the anticipated audience. For art books, there is the additional matter of number of illustrations. Ann Paludan's, Chinese Sculpture, a Great Tradition, deals with all five in an exemplary way. Tracing the history of Chinese sculpture from the Neolithic period through the twentieth century, the 559-page book and its 361 plates, most of them in colour, offer an even-handed yet stimulating survey of the material. It is the kind that only someone who has been fully immersed in her subject for decades, and who has studied first-hand almost every object about which she writes, could produce.
Paludan lays the ground rules for her study in the introduction. This is first and foremost a book about art. Readers will examine objects as thoroughly as is possible through descriptive writing and pictures. The readership should be familiar with the major periods of western art and a few masterpieces of western sculpture, such as relief sculpture of Chartres Cathedral or Michaelangelo's David. The author will provide basic background about Chinese thought and history, and characters for the major Chinese terms and sites. Finally, the author will offer her personal observations.
Following the introduction, the book is divided into four parts with a total of twelve chapters and an epilogue. Part one deals with sculpture of China's pre-Buddhist age. Most of the material comes from tombs. Chapter One is a very quick survey of pottery, bronze, and stone, including jade from the fourth millennium bce until the unification of China in 221 bce. The First Emperor's terra cotta army and other funerary sculpture, as well as terra cotta, pottery, and metal sculpture of the Han dynasty (206 bce – ce 220), are the subjects of Chapter Two. The last chapter of part one focuses on stone.
By the end of Chapter Three, many of the distinguishing features of this book are evident. Material is as important to Paludan's discussion as the subject matter of sculpture. Sculpture in stone is especially intriguing to her, and China's relationship with stone will be a recurrent theme. So will be the human face and the Chinese conception of portraiture. The writing is so clear, and the subject has been so thoroughly synthesised by the author that not only is every image discussed in detail, it has a purposeful fit in Paludan's narrative. The writing is bold, forthright, and without hesitancy. One learns that in a world of standardised, interchangeable parts a sculptor can achieve realism (p. 69) and that in the cheap medium clay he can create vitality as well as symbolism (pp. 96–97). The pictures are so convincing and the text so fluid that it is the reader's responsibility to sometimes step back and challenge. Has the author proved that Han and Tang “were the two great periods in figurine history (p. 85)” or that relief sculpture on statues found on the tomb mound of Huo Qubing, called a “magical group” by the author, “represent an attempt to communicate with the spirit world?” Even if the reader is not convinced, the ideas are worth the reader's attention. Paludan suggests, for example, that one interpretation of the famous horse and barbarian he tramples at the Huo Qubing tomb is the fundamental conflict and harmony of yin-yang (p. 114) and that the prevalence of monumental animals in Eastern Han art is due to a belief that they are able to communicate with auspicious phenomena from the unseen world (p. 131).
The focus of part two is secular and Buddhist art of the third through sixth centuries. Again, some of the comments are astute. Paludan describes it as a period of political disunion but artistic assimilation (p. 161), and she tells us that the process of absorption of the foreign religion Buddhism was “unsystematic and piecemeal” (p. 179), that in Sichuan, even Buddhist art is a “world of people” (p. 205), and that “even when foreign influence was at its highest, Buddhist art in China was . . . closer to . . . Chinese sculpture than that of the West” (p. 253). The presentation is so clear that a reader seeking introductory knowledge should be cautioned not to assume that every scholar in the field agrees with every statement in the book. Paludan writes, for example, that sculpture of the great Buddhist caves in Yungang and Longmen would be perceived as totally different from spirit path sculpture from the Nanjing region. Perhaps to some, but those who teach introductory courses on Chinese art might prefer to emphasise the unity of fifth-sixth century art across China. Then there is the over-emphasis on Maitreya. He does not sit in conversation with Sakyamuni; Prabhutaratna does (p. 157), nor can it be proved that Maitreya and Amitabha almost entirely replace Sakyamuni before the end of the fifth century (p. 191).
Part three takes the reader from the Tang dynasty through Southern Song and Jin, or from the seventh century into the thirteenth. Paludan subtitles the three chapters, “magnificent exploitation”. The sculpture is magnificent, but it is not clear what is exploited. The author's major points about Tang sculpture are that it is the watershed in Chinese sculptural history and that stone sculpture achieves the same plasticity as clay (pp. 262–263). Both are evident in the strikingly beautiful Tang examples. In the Tang chapter, eight, one first reads about statues that survived in situ in temples. They remain in two temples on Mount Wutai, Nanchan and Foguang. These are not, however, the only Tang temples. Two others without Tang statues remain in southern Shanxi province.
Chapter Eight also begins the discussion of sculpture in Buddhist caves in Sichuan province, the main subject of Chapter Nine. Found there, as Paludan notes, are some of the most human images produced in China, as well as unique representations of Tantric Buddhist practices and of syncretic Buddhist-Daoist sculpture. The statues convey their own power, and Paludan further strengthens their impact by her observations. She points out, that the sculptures of Baodingshan in Dazu “defy gravity” (p. 349), even as they adapt to the natural shape of the rock (p. 345 and p. 355). The sculpture of Sichuan is truly engaging, and this is a book in which the author convinces the reader to engage with it.
The last three chapters of Chinese Sculpture deal with China's most recent statuary. Paludan subtitles the period ‘mutation’ a strong term in this reviewer's opinion. Her argument is that beginning in the Yuan dynasty, the period of Mongolian rule, the former Chinese conventions of letting the material and subject speak for the sculpture and the sculpture's inner significance were supplanted by the importance of technical virtue (p. 402). Readers may notice more heavily decorated sculpture than those that illustrated earlier chapters (Figs. 276, 320, 324, and 328) and some examples of statues that are particularly smooth and rigid (Figs. 287, 322, 323, and 329), but that mutation is at work is harder to reconcile.
Otherwise, the strength of astute observation and cogent presentation of the development of Chinese sculpture over time continue through the last page of the book. The robust, physically energetic, occasionally even sensuous figures that Paludan describes are indeed found in the Yuan caves Feilaifeng in Hangzhou. Statues along Ming imperial spirit roads can be seen as “drawing on heavenly forces” (p. 432), but “more abstract” than those of Tang and Song (pp. 434–435). The reader is directed to see “contrasting materials” as characteristic of Ming-Qing vernacular sculpture and “dramatic display” as a sign of Sino-Tibetan sculpture of the Qing.
The last chapter offers the reader an exemplary choice of twenty images to represent Chinese sculpture since the middle of the twentieth century. As in the five hundred pages that precede it, the author presents the connection between politics and sculpture, and she equally addresses the sculptors' relation with materials and the ties between these statues and those of China's past.
Finally, one is inclined to compare Ann Paludan's book with Angela Howard et al.'s, Chinese Sculpture, that also was published in 2006. Both include long, informative, descriptive sections, both are beautifully illustrated, and both are intended as serious introductions to the subject. Amazingly, although some of the same illustrations and many from the same sites are found in both books, there is little overlap; reading both brings long overdue attention to a core subject of Chinese art that heretofore has rarely been studied alone. Howard's book has more detailed information, but Paludan's book tells us how to look at and engage with the sculpture.
