Ordinary Images

"Abe's elegant new book, packed with photographs, maps, and diagrams, follows on decades of consistent and often spectacular excavation and scholarship. . . . Abe reviews a good part of this material, describing both new finds and older ones, and presenting the new wealth of scholarship in English, Japanese, and especially Chinese on Buddhist artifacts from early medieval China."-- "Journal of Chinese Religion"
"Abe has presented a substantive study in this book, which is written with clarity and full of insights. The thorough documentation of sources is invaluable for further investigation."--Dorothy C. Wong "Journal of Asian Studies"
"Abe treats the images as case studies of specific regional and temporal groups outside the scope of traditional surveys of Chinese art history and engages the reader with his fresh visual insights and conviction that ordinary images are significant in their own right. His focus on and respect for objects and his resistance to using them merely for rhetorical or illustrative purposes can serve as an example to art historians and those in other fields of study who work with visual materials."--Katherine R. Tsiang "Artibus Asiae"
"This lavishly illustrated volume revises our understanding of China's early medieval (200-600 CE) religious sculpture. Through an exhaustive analysis of run-of-the-mill religious art objects and their accompanying inscriptions, Abe skillfully demonstrates the explanatory insufficiency of previous interpretative paradigms. . . . For students of East Asian religion and culture, it is a must."--Keith N. Knapp "Religious Studies Review"