Facing China

Facing China is an exploration of the portrait arts in China from the dynastic to the modern and contemporary, in painting, sculpture, photography, and video. The book focuses on truth and memory in the portraiture process, from encounters between subject, portrait, and artist, to broader familial, social, and political arenas. It also examines the influence of location on portrait production, reception, and display, from tombs, ancestral shrines, temples, gardens, and palace halls to public and private spaces.

Featuring one hundred fifty fine illustrations, with one hundred in colour, Facing China has much to say to specialists in the field as well as general readers interested in Chinese art.

Vinograd's brilliant Facing China fearlessly renegotiates the challenging territory of the Chinese portrait. Through attentive analysis and compelling readings, he offers a rich new vision of the portrait as agent and interface, one capable of generating human bonds and identities across lineage, community, cultures, and time.
– Roberta Wue, associate professor, University of California, Irvine, author of Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai

Facing China casts a broader vision across time and space that fully reflects the author's erudition, traversing boundaries between the historical and the modern/contemporary China and engaging cross-cultural issues beyond China to the global.
– Hui-shu Lee, professor of Chinese art, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China

Facing China, drawing on Vinograd's unsurpassed knowledge of the historical materials as well as his profoundly theoretical and creative approaches, is a brilliant and unprecedented study of portraits in Chinese visual culture.
– J. P. Park, June and Simon Li Professor in the History of Art and Fellow of Lincoln College, University of Oxford