About the author

Ding Xia is an author about whom little public information is currently available; only one work by this name is held in the collection, Forty Years of Recollections of the Art World (1902–1945). Judging from the title and its usual classification, the book belongs to documentary literature and draws on personal experience or firsthand observation to look back on the people and events of the art world in the first half of the twentieth century, spanning roughly forty years from 1902 to 1945. Memoirs of this kind often use a personal perspective to connect old friends and past happenings in fields such as the stage, painting and calligraphy, or opera, combining historical value with readability; readers can thereby gain a sense of the atmosphere, associations, and changes of the art world in that period. Because Ding Xia's nationality, dates of birth and death, English name, and life history cannot be confirmed, this introduction makes no conjectures and merely outlines the subject matter and genre of the surviving work, presenting its author as a recorder of bygone art-world affairs.

Written (1)

Publishers

Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House