The Double Screen

Wu Hung takes up a deceptively simple question: what counts as traditional Chinese painting? His answer runs through the folding screen, which was both a common object and a frequent subject in China, with examples spanning from the first centuries of the Common Era to the nineteenth century. He treats the screen as three things at once: a space for artistic imagination, a flat surface that creates illusions, and a piece of architecture that helped set cultural customs.

The screen divides a room, offers a ready-made ground for painting, and appears again and again as a motif throughout Chinese art. Because it takes on so many functions, it gave painters a continual way to rethink their craft. The author holds that understanding Chinese painting requires attention to its physical materials and to the cultural setting and conventions that shaped it.

From this vantage point, the book offers a non-Western view of art and culture, ranging over portraiture, narrative images, voyeurism and masquerade. It is written for art historians, scholars of Asian studies, and students and specialists in the field.