Taoist literature, art, miscellany, stories, architecture, music, sculpture, relics, calligraphy and painting.
The ritual rules governing Taoist image-making and a survey of surviving masterpieces by era—from Northern Dynasties shared Buddhist-Taoist niches through Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing works to modern statues—and what Taoist sculpture means for the history of Chinese art.
How Taoist sacred statuary came to be: from early Taoism’s view that the Tao has no form and needs no images, to image-making from the Liu Song period onward under Buddhist influence, and the aesthetics of “portraying form through spirit” that unite the transcendent and the worldly.