April 13, Katherine Tsiang

Friday, April 13,  4:30 – 6:30 pm, CWAC 156 (Please note the room change from last quarter!)

Yungang to Longmen Transition?  Perspectives on Reading the Evidence

Katherine Tsiang
Associate Director, Center for the Art of East Asia |Department of Art History, University of Chicago

Bodhisattva in the Guyang Cave Longmen, dedicated by Lady Yuchi, wife of the Prince of Changle, redated to the 9^th year of Taihe, 485.

This is based on a talk prepared for the Harvard workshop “Longmen Grottoes: New Perspectives” held last October at Harvard. Asked to speak on the transition between Yungang and Longmen, I examined the theme of transition on various levels and between and within different localities. This required reviewing the kinds of evidence that scholars have used in the study of these Buddhist cave shrines and different ways in which they have analyzed, prioritized, and applied this evidence to draw their conclusions. I’m continuing to reconsider the relationship between the Yungang and Longmen caves based on new readings of both textual and visual evidence. I present my talk as a modest tribute to Prof. Su Bai who died on February 1, 2018. He was a pioneering and towering figure in the study of Chinese archeology in China who I first met when he came to Chicago in the late 1980s. Su Bai was one if the founders of the program in archeology as a discipline at Peking University. He was a formidable authority on various areas of Chinese archeology and including Buddhist cave temples. Beginning in the 1950s, building on the groundbreaking study and detailed recording of Yungang and Longmen caves by Japanese scholars such as Sekino, Mizuno, and Nagahiro, Su Bai carried out his own research and refuted their conclusions about dating and periodization. His tireless spirit of inquiry and critical analysis of archeological and textual materials, as well as his kindness, are inspirational.