The Great Wall Of China

Author: Anne Wilkes Tucker

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $20.00 NZD
  • : 9780300122473
  • : Yale University Press
  • : Yale University Press
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  • : 1.24738
  • : April 2007
  • : 7.111 Inches X 9.5 Inches X 12 Inches
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  • : books

Special Fields

  • :
  • : Anne Wilkes Tucker
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  • : Hardback
  • :
  • :
  • : English
  • : very good
  • : 168
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Barcode 9780300122473
9780300122473

Description

Chen Changfen (b. 1941) began to photograph the Great Wall twenty years before the Chinese government officially adopted it as the national symbol in 1984. This fascinating book presents a small fraction of his decades-long study of the monumental form and conveys the fertile range of themes and ideas that Chen has investigated, each informed by traditional Chinese art, history, and philosophy. Combining a unique blend of traditional and contemporary technical processes, Chen's richly evocative photographs at once celebrate the remarkable series of building campaigns that produced the Wall and memorialize the thousands of conscripted labourers whose lives were sacrificed to its construction. One of the most striking features of Chen's photographs is their unexpected variety of perspectives and moods, capturing the vicissitudes of weather, time, and human history that have acted upon it. By excluding the people, highways, factories, and modern buildings that encroach on and daily destroy sections of the Wall, however, Chen eliminates major aspects of the Wall's present reality from his pictures.