Friday, November 6, 4:30-6:30pm, CWAC 152
This event is sponsored by CEAS Committee on Chinese Studies
Serial Landscapes: Visuality and Physicality in Place-making
Xin Wu
Assistant Professor, Art and Art History, College of William and Mary
How did the gaze enact, and act upon, place-making? This talk explores the significance of landscape in Confucian pedagogy and ritual, through an approach to visuality and spatiality. One of the four grand academies (shuyuan) of Song dynasty, the Marchmount Academy was closely related to activities of the founder of neo-Confucianism Zhu Xi (1130‒1200) who promoted an epistemology of renewed attention to nature. Connections between scholarly activities and academy landscape revealed links between philosophy, and the construction of cultural spaces initiated in landscape poetry and rooted in regional environments. While the intertwinement of the academy’s history with a classical landscape theme—Eight Views of Xiao-xiang—and the existent Buddhist territories invites further scrutiny. All these contributed to the formation of a new visuality of collective identity based on a decentered spatiality embodied within serial landscapes.
Friday November 6, 4:30-6:30pm, CWAC 152
Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact xizh@uchicago.edu
