Performing the Visual explores the practice of wall painting in China from a new perspective. Relying on rare, virtually unpublished drawings on Buddhist themes from a long-hidden medieval library in western China, the author analyzes the painters’ pictorial strategies. She also examines the financial accounting of Buddhist temples, providing practical information that ninth- and tenth-century critics ignored: how artists were paid and when, the temple's role as mediator between patrons and artists, and the way painters functioned outside the monastic system, working in guilds and secular academies affiliated with local government.

Based on the careful study of hundreds of inaccessible wall paintings at Dunhuang, arguably Asia's largest and most important Buddhist site, the author shows that although critics celebrated spontaneous feats with brush and ink, artists at Dunhuang were heavily dependent on concrete tools such as sketches in the preparation of wall painting.

胡素馨 Sarah Fraser 原执教于西北大学，现为德国海德堡大学任职。本书为其博士论文基础上出版，主题关于唐代敦煌的绘画与表演艺术。另刊载《亚洲艺术》（Artibus Asiae）2000年34：制作的程式: 敦煌画家的画稿与复制技术。

Sarah E. Fraser (Ph.D. 1996, UC Berkeley; Associate Professor) teaches and researches primarily in Chinese painting with an emphasis on questions of artistic enterprise in medieval Buddhist art, early development of photography, and national identity formation through archaeological and ethnographic projects in the Republican period (1912-1949). Her books include Performing the Visual: Buddhist Wall Painting Practice in China and Central Asia, 618-960 (Stanford University Press, 2004), which concerns Chinese theories of spontaneity and workshop production in the middle period. Performing was recognized by the American Library Association's Choice award for Outstanding Academic book in 2004 and nominated for the College Art Association's annual award for best art history book in 2005. Fraser published an edited volume of essays on Buddhist material culture with the Shanghai Fine Arts Publishers, 2003, entitled Merit, Opulence and the Buddhist Network of Wealth, containing the Chinese proceedings of fieldwork and major conference she organized with Peking University in 1999-2001. She was the Chief Editor of wall painting and sculpture for the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive (MIDA), part of ARTstor––a new genre of web-based, art history research publication.

Her articles and book chapters include contributions to Artibus Asiae, Orientations, L'art de Dunhuang à la Bibliothèque nationale de France, Asia Major, Reinventing the Past, and the Tenth Tibetan Studies Conference, Oxford University. She has received fellowships from the Getty Center for Arts and Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, National Academy of Sciences, The Luce Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH. In 2009-10 Prof. Fraser was a Frederick Burkhardt Fellow and Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton completing a manuscript on archaeological tourism in Republican China. She served as curatorial consultant and published in the catalogue for Brush and Shutter, Early Photography in China, an exhibition at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2010-11. In 1999-2000 she was appointed Directrice d'Études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. Fraser has directed major international research projects on Buddhist art at Northwestern. Under the auspices of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she served as Dunhuang Project Director, 1999-2004. She also founded and directed a Luce Foundation Cooperative Research project on technology and archaeology with the Dunhuang Research Foundation and Peking University, 1998-2003. Prof. Fraser served as Art History Department Chair 2004-2007 and Director of Graduate Studies 2000-2003.