blog.rightreading.com

It’s premature to announce this but I’m impatient so I’ll go ahead and do it anyway. The empire is expanding with another website/blog. It’s www.7junipers.com, and it will be my place for comment on Asian art and culture.
The title alludes to the seven junipers of Zhidao Guan, a Taoist temple in the city of Changshu [...]

I’m in the beginning stages of designing a new book about Persian ceramics. It will be a small book (for an art book), at 9.5 x 10 inches the closest to square I have ever done. This is the proportion known as the “turned pentagram” because it is the shape of a rectangle drawn around [...]

Bertelsmann is continuing its quest to be the print version of Google and control all the world’s paper-based information (all of it that’s profitable, that is) by expanding into China. It see China potentially generating 10 percent of its global sales revenue.

Publishers have been accused of pandering to an ignorant public. The time has come to panda to them instead. And researchers at a giant panda reserve in southern China are helping to make it happen.
The thing about giant pandas is they’re not just cute they’re also big. And they eat a lot of bamboo. Enough [...]

I’m writing this from yet another press check. Yes, I put this 144-page full-color, complicated art book together in a single month. I received materials in January and I’ll have finished books next week.
While the speed of this job is remarkable (museum art books often take a year or more to put together), what I [...]

Over at Frisco Vista a new page of basic information on the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has gone up.
Is it better than the museum’s own sprawling site? (More concise, certainly.) How about the Wikipedia page on the Asian Art Museum?

Are the San Francisco travel guide books dissing Asia?
That’s what Frisco Vista says.

I don’t know much about Ki Gendeng Pamungkas’s curse on GWB, except that it required the blood of a snake, a goat, and a crow and, according to the shaman, “will make him bloat like broccoli.” The image (from the Daily Kos) shows Ki Gendeng Pamungkas drinking sheep’s blood during an anti-Bush [...]

There’s no internet censorship in China. A Chinese official, at a United Nations internet summit in Athens, explained:
I don’t think we should be using different standards to judge China. In China, we don’t have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that’s a different problem. I know that some colleagues listen [...]

I’ve posted, in beta, my new essay on Asian influences on European printing. This essay is intended for print, but I’d like to get some feedback from knowledgable folks first (or even afterwards, for that matter). So this is the space for that. This was a pretty big project, so I hope someone might want [...]

Since I’ve had a few visitors to my new rendering of the Yi jing recently I thought thought I’d make a post here in case anyone wants to comment.