Flowering in the Shadows

For well over a thousand years Chinese and Japanese women created, commissioned, collected and used paintings, yet until recently this fact has scarcely been acknowledged in the study of East Asian art by Westerners. Notable women in the history of East Asian art are introduced - lady-painters of the Heian Court, female patrons of Buddhist temples, a Mongolian princess art collector, women poet-painters of the Edo period, and artists of the Ching gentry. The essays represent a wide range of women who played roles in East Asian art and place them in their cultural contexts, while also modifying lingering stereotypes of pre-modern Asian women as receivers rather than shapers of culture.