Theater of the Dead: a Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000-1400

摘要

Jeehee Hong's Theater of the Dead is a bold, interpretive study of four hundred years of Chinese funerary art of the time frame currently referred to in Sinology as the Middle Period. Focusing on representations of performance in relief and paint that decorate tomb walls and on tomb figurines primarily in Shanxi and Henan provinces of North China, she builds a case that representation of dramatic, orchestral, and other kinds of performance such as acrobatics cannot but enliven the tomb environment. This merging of the world of death and entertainment, she believes, is a "distinctive mode of visual theatricality" (3) in which tomb builders, many of them without titles or government offices, of the status of perhaps local elite, indulged from the Five Dynasthies (907-960) through the Yuan dynasty (1267-1368).