James Flath's The Cult of Happiness is a stimulating and accessible book that contributes to more than one area of current concern in Chinese studies. The author effectively situates his work in relation to developing debates about print culture, alternative conceptions or experiences of modernity, and the relationship of popular culture to markets and to state power. It should also appeal to readers interested more generally in modern Chinese art, history and visual culture.In this general vein, the book would be valuable simply as one of only a very few English-language works that deal with woodcut-printed nianhua or New Year's Pictures. These pictures, which depict a range of subjects from gods to auspiciously fat babies to scenes from legend and history, were a ubiquitous part of Chinese household ritual and decoration well into the 20th century, and are still evoked in a variety of contexts in contemporary Chinese visual culture. For various reasons, they have not received as much scholarly attention as they should, especially in comparison to other popular print traditions, such as their distant Japanese cousins, ukiyo-e prints. As a genre, nianhua are believed to have quite a long history (Chinese sources, for example, often identify a print found in a 12th-century tomb as one of the earliest extent nianhua), and they were certainly made and circulated throughout China. Flath, however, wisely limits his study both temporally and geographically by focusing on the last decades of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, when the vast majority of nianhua now extant were made, and on north China, which encompasses several of the most influential and best-documented centres of nianhua production.
A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture. Wu Hung . London: Reaktion Books, 2012. 293 pp. £40.00. ISBN 978-1-86189-876-0