Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing, a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of lavishly illustrated books, which constituted the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated in a number of contemporary publications. Focusing on Zhou's work, Art by the Book describes how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public, and shows how painting manuals functioned as a form in which everything from icons of popular culture to graphic or literary cliche was presented to both gratify and shape the sensibilities of a growing reading public. As a special commodity of early modern China, when cultural standing was measured by a person's command of literati taste and lore, painting manuals provided nonelite readers with a device for enhancing social capital.

J. P. Park builds on important recent research on social status, economic development, and print publishing in late imperial China to show how a world of social meaning is evident in the literary subgenre of painting manuals, and provides insight into the links between art history, print culture, and social history.

J.P. Park is an assistant professor in Department of the History of Art, Univeristy of California, Riverside.

J.P. Park’s research interests touch upon a wide spectrum of art historical materials ranging from ancient tombs in North Korea to contemporary art in China. His first book, Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (University of Washington Press, 2012) discusses how the genre of “how-to-paint” books can be productively examined as a key element in the larger cultural matrix of the early modern China, not only in terms of the knowledge and practice of art, but also as a register of social changes, gender issues, fashion, leisure, and conflicts of taste. He has also authored an exhibition catalogue, Keeping It Real: Korean Artists in the Age of Multi-Media Representation, wherein he tries to expose the limitations of current modes of globalization in contemporary art and illuminates the concept of “post- globalism” as an alternative channel of historical analysis. He has also published multiple articles on contemporary East Asian art, Chinese print culture, and Chinese literary criticism. He is currently finishing up another manuscript project titled, A New Middle Kingdom: Chinese Art and Cultural Politics in Late Chosŏn Korea (1650–1850).

Education

2000 B.A., Seoul National University

2002 M.A., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

2005 Graduate Research Student, Peking University

2007 Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor