Performing Images: Opera In Chinese Visual Culture Edited By Judith T. Zeitlin and Yuhang Li Smart Museum of Art: The University of Chicago Press 2014 224 pages 150 colour plates Paperback £24.50 Don't bother looking for Chinese art among the permanent collections of the great art museums of the West as you won't find any! The National Gallery here in London, the Louvre, the Uffizi and El Prado are virtually uncontaminated by anything produced by the largest nation on the planet. Of course you will find an abundance in ethnographic collections where 19 th century loot is presented for scholarly scrutiny, for example in our own British Museum, or among the Victoria & Albert Museum's decorative arts where we are encouraged to kowtow to the ingenuity of an exotic and distant people. But the Chinese were dealing with aesthetics and art production, often on a mass scale, while we in the West were still in the dark ages. Art history and its stifling discourse continues even in these enlightened times to dictate the canon of great works and artists and, moreover, those objects to be judged as art: usually painting and sculpture. In China a different discourse existed where, while painting, poetry and calligraphy reigned supreme, the so-called minor decorative arts were still held in high esteem while relegated here in Europe. A similar situation exists with Chinese theatre in particular opera - not elite highbrow entertainment as it remains in the West but urban street theatre with a long history of performance and interaction with society at all levels, but not always a happy one. Indeed more recently, having adapted to the demands of the post-1949 Communist leadership in presenting opera that celebrated Mao Zedong's revolution, performers were soon denounced as counter-revolutionaries, beaten and even driven to suicide during the Cultural Revolution. What this indicates is that opera in China mattered and has been a part of popular consciousness for centuries. This fact is demonstrated through the research and the resulting exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago and in the accompanying catalogue. Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture was curated by Judith T. Zeitlin and Yuhang Li earlier this year bringing together for the first time a diverse collection of objects, covering the greater part of a thousand years, all sharing images taken from and inspired by Chinese, or more specifically, Peking opera. Traditional Chinese theatre (Xiqu) always contained both song and music and while travelling through the Qing Empire missionary Évariste Huc observed that there were no people like the Chinese with 'a taste and passion for theatrical entertainment'. Even from a contemporary perspective anyone who has seen Chen Kaige's 1993 award winning film Farewell My Concubine will be familiar with the colour, costume, and cacophony accompanying the telling of stories from China's glorious yet turbulent past. This passion and vibrancy is evident in the representation of scenes from theatre upon a multitude of items brought together in this exhibition ranging from scrolls, books and prints to ceramics, fans, textiles and personal everyday objects in the possession of all classes. What is clear from the curators’ research is that so little of what they have identified comes from Chinese fine arts alone. Instead the enormously wide range of surfaces used demonstrates the power of opera in infiltrating the imagination of so many people via the things they used every day. As an academic research project Zeitlin and her former student Yuhang's exhibition was a tour de force and the catalogue stands as its legacy with thoroughly engrossing and educational essays, which are never didactic and are written by both local and, pleasingly, not wholly western authors. In fact those with south