EDITORIAL

Banqueting with the ancestors

The articles on Chinese art in this issue have been guest-edited by Dame Jessica Rawson, Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Warden of Merton College and a member of Apollo's editorial board. Here she reflects on the characteristics of art in China.

ARCHITECTURE

Poste-haste to closure

The post-offices of Britain, restrained, elegant and grounded in neo-Georgian domesticity, are sorely missed when reduced to a tawdry logo outside a supermarket.

Art Business

Will China’s art-hungry millionaires help the market avoid the chill of an American recession?

Market Review

Record prices were set in almost every area of the market in New York’s Asia Week and buyers were out in force and spending hard at Maastricht. But, despite some pop-star provenances, Victorian decorative arts performed patchily in London.

Asian Art Market

Unusually, contemporary art takes centre stage in Hong Kong this month, but there is also plenty of outstanding earlier art to tempt buyers, writes Susan Moore.

Collector's Focus

The traditional strength of this market in France and Belgium has been reinforced by recent major sales and the world’s leading fairs, writes Lucian Harris.

Around the Galleries

Three fairs, in Brussels, Moscow and Paris, are among May’s highlights.

Market Preview

Spectacular Impressionist and modern paintings come up for sale in New York this month – with some spectacular estimates.

A World Leader in the Study of China

The launch this year of the University of Oxford China Centre heralds a dynamic period in the study of China at Oxford, as Heather Bell explains.

Bodhisattvas, Jewels & Demons

Katherine Tsiang describes the search for sculptures looted from 6th-century Buddhist cave temples in northern China, part of a project for the temples’ digital ‘restoration’.

Offerings from the Bronze Age

Jessica Rawson introduces highlights from Sir Peter Moores’ remarkable collection of ancient Chinese bronzes at Compton Verney, and explains how our knowledge of these ritual vessels is being transformed by archaeological discoveries.

Porcelain raised from the sea

Underwater excavations of shipwrecks are making major additions to our knowledge of the early international trade in Chinese ceramics as well as bringing to the surface objects of great beauty and interest in their own right, as Rose Kerr explains.

Art history in the making

Many of the works in Khoan and Michael Sullivan’s collection of modern Chinese paintings are gifts from the artists, a tribute to the support and friendship the couple offered them when they toiled against repression and poverty, writes Josh Yiu.

Modern art takes to the waves

In 1933 Cunard commissioned paintings from Edward Wadsworth and other leading British artists for its new flagship liner, the "Queen Mary". But, as Abbie N. Sprague explains, artistic expression had to bend to commercial taste.

Made in China

Guy and Myriam Ullens are the creators of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing. It will draw on their great private collection in Geneva, which Mr Ullens showed to Louise Nicholson.

In search of Sebastiano

Fine as it is, the exhibition currently in Rome on Sebastiano del Piombo suffers from a lack of generosity in loans from some major collections, writes Andrew Hopkins.

Heros and graces

Tate Britain’s exhibition of neo-classical sculpture celebrates the return to esteem of the most admired works of their age, writes Ruth Guilding.

Wright in Liverpool

Hugh Belsey welcomes an illuminating exhibition on a turning-point in Joseph Wright’s career.

Thomas Hope's 'true taste'

This imaginatively staged exhibition pays handsome tribute to a great connoisseur, collector and designer, writes Tim Knox.

Gardening leave

The sculptural integrity in Ivor Abrahams’s depictions of gardens overpowers suggestions of caricature, argues Tim Richardson.

Pintoricchio in dreamland

Perugia’s ambitious survey of one of the greatest artists of renaissance Umbria is both stimulating and challenging, writes Francis Russell.

Communist couture

Any idea that the Chinese were indifferent to fashion is over-turned by this stylish study, writes Robert E. Harrist.

Golden chopsticks

Spectacular recent finds from a princely tomb have changed our understanding of Ming decorative arts, writes Craig Clunas.

Empresses and elephants

Frances Wood reviews a lively account of the changing roles of the Forbidden City, which focuses on its recent transformations.

Material wealth

Craig Clunas draws on an astonishing range of evidence to present his richly detailed account of the many and varied roles of ‘pictures and things’ in Ming society, writes Evelyn S. Rawski.