Reverse paintings on glass occupy a special place in Chinese art, spanning the genres of glass working, export art, folk art, erotica, and meiren hua (paintings of beauties). Their unique appearance is the result of a challenging production process in which artists layer pigments in the reverse order of the normal painting procedure–highlights first, then mid-layers, and finally base colours. The final product is viewed in reverse from the opposite side of the glass, which must also be considered when creating the paintings. A product of the encounter between East and West, the manufacture of glass paintings in China was stimulated by European glass paintings brought to the imperial court by traders and diplomats in the seventeenth century. Initially made in Canton for Western consumers, by the eighteenth century their production had spread throughout China, with subjects and styles adapted to suit local tastes. The glass paintings in the Mei Lin Collection represent this later floweri
Jonathan Stalling’s experimental approach to bridging art, poetics, and linguistics imagines a world where individual value systems are no longer translated into the language of other mediums, but foster conscious “interlanguages.” Stalling writes, “Meeting in the middle, ‘interlanguages’ are spaces where one learns a new language without having left one’s home fully behind; these situations can result in richly generative interlingual and intercultural estuaries which provide new ways of imagining.” Stalling’s conceptual language art fuses Classical Chinese poetics and linguistics with modern algorithms to create art installations and poetry that transform Chinese into English and English into Chinese in new and surprising ways.With a visual gallery of Stalling’s work, an interview with the artist, a critical introduction by the editor, and critical chapters written by the comparative literature scholar Timothy Billings and Chinese Linguist Liu Nian, the volume provides readers with a