March 9, Deng Fei

Friday, March 9,  4:30 – 6:30 pm, CWAC 152

Popularized Landscapes: Pictures of Landscape in Tombs in Yuan China (1271—1368)

Professor Deng Fei

Associate Professor, National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Fudan University | Visiting Scholar, Harvard-Yenching Institute

Landscape painting on the north wall in Feng Daozhen’s tomb (1265) found in Datong, Shanxi

Landscape painting is generally recognized as the major category within China’s painting tradition. The visual representation of nature not only appears in art from above the ground, but also in tomb decorations under the earth. Many tombs, which depict images of landscape on their interior walls, have been found in North China during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This talk will address these materials and answer the following question: why were these pictures chosen to surround the deceased? The study will investigate various pictorial contents of the landscape paintings as well as multiple roles and meanings they assumed. By considering landscape not simply as an object to be seen, but as an instrument of cultural force, I hope to probe the cultural, social, and religious environments in which the landscape motifs were developed.