Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia.

AuthorMiller, Allison
PositionBook review

Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia. Edited by MARY M. DUSENBURY. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. Pp. 285. S65.

In the pre-modern world, color had an intimate relationship with its material substance. Its value depended not only on its hue, but also on its durability, cost, and the accessibility of the substances from which it was derived. Previously, the topic of color in East Asia had mostly been studied by conservators and scholars of Five Phase Cosmology. Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia represents the ground-breaking collaboration of a diverse group of scientist and humanists working together to explore the role played by color, dyes, and pigments in East Asian art, thought, politics, religion, science, and society.

The volume succeeds in presenting a multi-faceted approach to color through sixteen original essays on the topic. The essays are divided into five sections: Colors and Symbolism in Ancient China; Tomb and Grotto Paintings; Dyes in Ancient Chinese and Japanese Textiles; Color at the Court of Japan; and Color in Religious Art in Medieval East Asia. The work concludes with a useful appendix that presents an overview of the major dye plants and mordants of ancient and medieval East Asia.

Guolong Lai's essay appears first in the volume and focuses on the relationship between the material basis of color and its symbolic meaning. He proposes that a color's power in antiquity can be connected to its medicinal properties. Lacquer black and cinnabar red were magical hues because they were created with highly protective, but also toxic, substances (p. 39). Lai also surveys the colors employed in early Chinese artifacts from the Neolithic to the Western Han and contends that "magicoreligious practices" influenced the shift from a binary red-black system to a quinary five-color system in the Eastern Zhou (p. 43).

Lai's essay is followed by two chapters on organic pigments, which comprise section II. The first, Lisa Shekede and Su Bomin's essay on the Mogao grottos, employs technical analysis to reveal several new findings about Dunhuang's wall paintings. They show, for example, that the much admired, dark-skinned asparas found in Northern Liang to Northern Zhou period paintings were originally fair-skinned; they were painted with lead white paint and shaded with cinnabar and red lead, which has since deteriorated (p. 48). They also analyze shifts in color usage during the medieval period, demonstrating that at times a...

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