Ce très bel ouvrage sur la céramique Khmer présente 150 pièces de la plus importante collection privée au monde. Chacune d'entre elle est accompagnée d'un texte bref qui explique sa fonction, son contexte ou sa signification.
One of the oldest storytelling traditions, shadow theatre combines puppetry with music, philosophy, history, storytelling, fashion, ritual, religion, and education.
While each nation in Southeast Asia has its own distinct culture, shadow theatre is a shared theme. Many of the masters make their own puppets, play all the musical instruments, learn long texts in ancient languages, sing, study movement, and perform for long period of time in what is one of the most difficult and challenging art forms. Most of the performers are farmers, fisherman, factory workers, or teachers by day and artists by night.
Through documentary photography, A Life in Shadows by Constantine Korsovitis, illustrates the sophistication and value of shadow theatre and its creators, and the author has been capturing the spirit and multiplicity of shadow theatre since 1999 in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia, the common thread being the use of the Hindu epics of the Ramayana and the Mara Mahabharata as a source stories.
Stunning images from the Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837 - 1921), one of the most influential photographers of the 19th century and a pioneer of photojournalism.
Bencharong, a unique class of Chinese export ware, was made exclusively for Thai royalty and the ruling elite in the late 18th and 19th centuries. These rare and highly collectable enamelled porcelain belongs in time and place to the broader tradition of Chinese export art for teh European and American markets, but it is distinctively Thai in style and aesthetics.
Banteay Chhmar is the second monument of ancient Cambodia's greatest king, Jayavarman VII. This temple, built in the late 12th-Century by one of Cambodia's most original stone carving and architectural workshops, lay in ruins for almost a thousand years under a remote forest halfway between Angkor, the declining capital of the once mighty Khmers and Ayutthaya, the burgeoning new hub of the rising Thai kingdom. At first the remoteness of Banteay Chhmar made it the distant jewel in the magnificent monumental landscape of the Khmers, but after the Khmer Empire declined in the 14th century, the temple's art was left exposed to generations of looters. To uncover the secrets of this large, beautiful and still forest-draped complex, Peter Sharrock has brought together a team of international experts, including Claudes Jacques, Olivier Cunin and Thiery Zephir, to decipher the reliefs of the master carvers, identify the esoteric Buddhist deities and open a new vista on Jayavarman's reign. Lavishly illustrated with 300 specially commissioned photographs this is the first book devoted to this beautiful, remarkable and important temple.
Construction at Pagan peaked between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries when the city was home to the countrys kings and its chief religious personalities. Local architects mastered complex brick vaulting techniques unrivalled in Asia, while mural painters and stone carvers fashioned a distinctive style of Burmese art. By the mid-fourteenth century the capital had shifted north to what is now the Mandalay region, and the pace of building slowed dramatically. However, the city never lost its special religious and cultural significance, furnishing a field of merit to Buddhists old and new.
