Ankeney Weitz
Associate Professor, Art and East Asian Studies
Colby College, Maine
Friday, February 11, 4-6 pm
CWAC 156
A Social History of Painted Fans in the Song Dynasty
Abstract:
Across the Song empire, people of all ages, genders, and ranks carried fans emblazoned with decorative designs appropriate to their status and expressive of their individual style. Much art-historical writing on round Song “album leaves” treats these objects primarily as paintings; however, this paper views the painted fan as an item of daily use. By studying the fans’ production, decoration, use, and exchange, we can better appreciate the gender and class meanings encoded in the pictorial decoration. The paper begins with a figurative removal of the paintings’ current mounts in an attempt to imagine the painting floating in the hand.
