“Ten Thousand Miles of the Yangzi River – The Emergence of a Painting Subject and Pictorial Characteristics in Early Extant Handscrolls”
Julia Orell
(Ph.D. candidate, University of Chicago)
Friday, 4-6 p.m. Feb.13
CWAC 156
Abstract
The talk presents parts of two chapters from my dissertation on the depiction of the Yangzi River in late Song and Yuan dynasty landscape painting.
The first half of the talk traces the emergence of the Yangzi River as subject matter in landscape painting through textual sources and analyzes its reception, geographical, and social context. My focus is on late Song, Yuan, and early Ming dynasty materials that provide a surprisingly rich repository of information that stands in stark contrast to the scarcity of Song dynasty materials on the one hand and the overwhelming abundance of mostly connoisseurly discussion in later Ming and Qing dynasty texts.
Placing four extant handscrolls within the tentative narrative provided by the textual sources, the second part of the talk focuses on the analysis of some peculiar pictorial features of these scrolls. In exploring the scrolls’ respective modes of depicting a specific geographical region, I address questions pertaining to their place in the tradition of landscape painting, and the categories of topographical painting and picture-maps.
