Customer Reviews

Ming Furniture in the Light of Chinese Architecture

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a beautiful & scholarly book written by an eminent art historian. The organization by furniture type (i.e. chairs, tables, beds, cabinets)makes it easy to use as a reference book. The text is beautifully written and highly informative, filled with quotations & poems about Chinese culture and history. This is not a text that focuses only on cabinet-making. It explains the relationship between Chinese architecture & furniture. The photographs are not only beautiful, they also illustrate & expand upon the text in that they include current photos of furniture as well as historical paintings & illustrations showing the context for the objects. The book has an index, bibliography, and endnotes. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in Chinese art & architecture.

Being a fan of Sarah Handler, its easy to feel the furniture flow through the Ming Architecture.

Just having retured from China and Tibet, this book was in the back of my mind as I stood and gazed up at the columns and beams mortised and tenoned together to form the typical Chinese structural backbone. Sarah has made the connection between the structural engineering of Ming/Qing building skills and the master carpenters' use of the Lu Bang Jin manual that describes appropriate and propitious use of shapes,materials, orientation and all things lucky in architecture. Buy this book and you will be happy,have prosperity and long life!

BEN

chinese furniture have a strong relationship with architecture, in its proportion, construction, and relationship to the space. I was looking forward to see a more detailed analysis of such relationship but this book turned out to be a mediocre repetition of numerous chinese furniture books already in the market. Many of the pictures are from dealer's photos or Museum's existing photos. The reference paintings are primary from Chin P'ing Mei or similar paintings which have been published numerous times by other authors. The sketch or drawings are mediocre. There are no measured or proportional anaylsis of the furniture to the architecture. I have returned this book.