Past Awards

Screen of Kings is the first book in any language to examine the cultural role of the regional aristocracy or ‘kings’ – relatives of the emperors – in Ming dynasty China (1368–1644). Through an investigation of their patronage of architecture, calligraphy, painting and other art forms, and through examination of the contents of their splendid and recently excavated tombs, this innovative study puts the aristocracy back at the heart of accounts of China’s cultural and artistic histories, from which they have until very recently been excluded. 

When is a landscape more than a landscape? This is a richly illustrated study of an important genre of Ming-dynasty Chinese painting in which landscapes are actually disguised portraits that celebrate an individual and his achievements, ambitions, and tastes in an open effort to win recognition, support, and social status. In this unique study, Anne de Coursey Clapp presents a broad view of these commemorative landscape paintings, including antecedents in the Song and Yuan dynasties.

Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries. In this richly illustrated book, Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images and reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism. She shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart.

Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing published a series of lavishly illustrated books that were the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated. Art by the Book describes how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public, and both gratified and shaped their sensibilities. As a 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.

Held in honor of Edward “Ted” Farmer’s retirement from the University of Minnesota after 43 years of teaching, the two-day “mini-conference” covered a broad range of topics, including Chinese culture, Ming institutions, world history, and modern China.

This study of late-Ming material culture focuses on an erotic fiction genre, the marketing and consuming strategies behind it, and the Daoist allegory contained within. Specific features of the presentation of eroticism in these novellas include the legitimation of sexuality in cosmological thinking, the moralization and politicalization of sexuality, the medical discourse on sexuality, pleasure prescribed by ars erotica, and the religious dimension of sexuality.

The Geiss Hsu Foundation fully-supported and conducted the Ming Provincial Courts Conference, held at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. Nine scholars from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, China, and the United States presented papers and discussed the courts of imperial clansmen outside Beijing. Participants drew attention to their patronage of painting, religion, scholarship, as well as the courts’ social, economic, and military dimensions. Some papers delivered at the conference were published in Ming Studies Volume 12, Issue 65.

Featuring eleven original papers presented at Ming Taizu and His Times, an international conference hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and supported by the Geiss Hsu Foundation, the book is one of the most substantial collections of essays on the Ming founder. It offers new interpretations on Ming Taizu, the challenges he faced, the resources he drew upon, and his successes and failures in meeting those difficulties. The collection as a whole opens the ways for a reconsideration and reevaluation of the founder of the Ming Dynasty.