Imagining Sculpture

A new critical approach to understanding sculpture across cultures.

Imagining Sculpture is the story of the absence of a powerful European idea: Sculpture. In China statues, stele, and other figural objects were made for millennia but were not categorized as Sculpture. Imagining Sculpture explains how they were seen in China as objects beyond the category of Sculpture. Stanley Abe has written a series of short historical and fictional vignettes about travelers, scholars, officials, collectors, and antiquarians who encounter statues, figures, and effigies in China and the West from the fourteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Imagining Sculpture is visual, cinematic, and sumptuous, featuring rare photographs, paintings, sketches, letters, and ephemera. With little text, images propel the narrative.
 

Sculpture is just a word, an English word, which elicits an image in the mind’s eye. Sculpture is a European idea. In China statues, stele and other figural objects were made for millennia but not valued or collected as Sculpture. There was no Sculpture in China. Imagining Sculpture is the story of this something that did not exist. Imagining Sculpture is a series of short vignettes, historical and fictional. Travelers, scholars, officials, collectors, and antiquarians encounter statues, figures, and effigies in China, Japan, England, Germany, France, Italy, and the United States from the fourteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Imagining Sculpture is visual, cinematic and sumptuous—told with rare photographs, paintings, sketches, letters and ephemera. With little text, the argument is made by the images. Imagining Sculpture offers a new kind of visual narrative and offers a radically different way of seeing and knowing.