Performing the Visual explores the practice of wall painting in China from a new perspective. Relying on rare, virtually unpublished drawings on Buddhist themes from a long-hidden medieval library in western China, the author analyzes the painters’ pictorial strategies. She also examines the financial accounting of Buddhist temples, providing practical information that ninth- and tenth-century critics ignored: how artists were paid and when, the temple's role as mediator between patrons and artists, and the way painters functioned outside the monastic system, working in guilds and secular academies affiliated with local government.
Based on the careful study of hundreds of inaccessible wall paintings at Dunhuang, arguably Asia's largest and most important Buddhist site, the author shows that although critics celebrated spontaneous feats with brush and ink, artists at Dunhuang were heavily dependent on concrete tools such as sketches in the preparation of wall painting.

The Lotus Sutra has been the most widely read and most revered Buddhist scripture in East Asia since its translation in the third century. The miracles and parables in the "king of sutras" inspired a variety of images in China, in particular the sweeping compositions known as transformation tableaux that developed between the seventh and ninth centuries. Surviving examples in murals painted on cave walls or carved in relief on Buddhist monuments depict celestial journeys, bodily metamorphoses, cycles of rebirth, and the achievement of nirvana. Yet the cosmos revealed in these tableaux is strikingly different from that found in the text of the sutra. Shaping the Lotus Sutra explores this visual world.
Challenging long-held assumptions about Buddhist art, Eugene Wang treats it as a window to an animated and spirited world. Rather than focus on individual murals as isolated compositions, Wang views the entire body of pictures adorning a cave shrine or a pagoda as a visual mapping of an imaginary topography that encompasses different temporal and spatial domains. He demonstrates that the text of the Lotus Sutra does not fully explain the pictures and that a picture, or a series of them, constitutes its own "text." In exploring how religious pictures sublimate cultural aspirations, he shows that they can serve both political and religious agendas and that different social forces can co-exist within the same visual program. These pictures inspired meditative journeys through sophisticated formal devices such as mirroring, mapping, and spatial programming - analytical categories newly identified by Wang.
The book examines murals in cave shrines at Binglingsi and Dunhuang in northwestern China and relief sculptures in the grottoes of Yungang in Shanxi, on stelae from Sichuan, and on the Dragon-and-Tiger pagoda in Shandong, among other sites. By tracing formal impulses in medieval Chinese picture-making, such as topographic mapping and pictorial illusionism, the author pieces together a wide range of visual evidence and textual sources to reconstruct the medieval Chinese cognitive style and mental world. The book is ultimately a history of the Chinese imagination.

图像是历史的遗留，同事也记录着历史，是解读历史的重要证据。从图像中，我们不仅能看到过去的影像，更能通过对这些影像的解读探索它们背后潜藏着的信息。政治的、经济的、军事的、文化的……“一幅画所说的话何止千言万语”。面对数量难以穷尽的图像。历史学家也就面对着惊人的宝藏，但宝藏下面，也隐藏着难以觉察的陷阱。彼得?伯克以其杰出新文化史家的广阔视野，对包括工艺品、画像、雕塑、电影、电视、平面广告等的多种视觉材料进行了分析，关注的重点并非这些图像本身，而是如何利用它解读历史，以及在此过程中存在的机遇与危险。

《图像的生与死》是一部讲述图像在西方的起源、演进和死亡的历史，同时也是一部通过分析图像及其传播手段而建立的西方思想史。
《图像的生与死》是一部跨学科研究之作，在书中，雷吉斯•德布雷第一次解释了他所创设的一门新学科：媒介学。该学科处于艺术史、技术史、宗教史等多学科的交汇之处。全书论述了西方人视角下图像从魔幻的到艺术的再到经济的演变过程，对技术革命与集体信仰对于图像所产生的影响进行了深刻分析。作者从西方哲学、宗教、艺术、科技、媒体等方面，对图像起到的作用和反作用进行了详尽又深入的解读，许多观点都闪烁着思想的光芒。

本书以古代中国与域外文化交流为主题，将古代中国置于整个欧亚大陆的历史画卷中，利用文献、考古和图像资料，由近而远进行讲述：前两个讲题以中国和北方草原游牧社会的交流为主，后两个讲题则涉及整个欧亚大陆的两端，以具体艺术表现或物质生活中的实例，说明文化交流的双向性和复杂性。

在作者看来，20世纪大量新出土中古中国时期的文本和图像材料，如果把它们放在亚洲的范围，进而放在世界的范围内考察，那么，隋唐时期呈现的中国文化面貌，显而易见，是多种文化融合的结果，对之进行考察的视阈既不能限于长安洛阳，也不能限于以安西四镇为重点的西域。在某种意义上说，文化的多元，而非思想的一统，成就了唐代的辉煌。渊源于西亚北非的摩尼教文本残片和来自西亚的祆教性质的图像等大量新材料的出土，正是对这种开放性和多元化文明的细节表述。本辑所收文章是一些个案研究，用意在于追寻中古时代欧亚之间的内陆交通往来，并探讨中古中国与外部世界在物质生活和思想观念等不同层次上的交互影响。

本书是法国艺术史家于贝尔•达弥施有关摄影与电影研究成果的汇总，分为四个部分：第一部分探讨摄影的本质，同时提出一个一直萦绕着他的问题：摄影是没有历史的，或者说，由于摄影的本质，不可能存在一种摄影史——哪怕在纪念他所崇敬的瓦尔特•本雅明撰写的《摄影小史》时，他也多次重申这一问题；第二部分，分述三种不同的摄影实践，包括曾经昙花一现的立体视像、法国当代作家兼摄影家德尼•洛什的创作，以及加拿大多才多艺的全能艺术家迈克尔•斯诺的作品；第三部分专门讨论“建筑摄影”这一特殊类型；第四部分探讨运动的图像，也就是电影中的影像，最终提出一个“节奏-影像”的概念，与德勒兹的“时间-影像”与“运动-影像”相映成趣。