Author: xizh

Friday, May 27, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156

Stone Drums en route: Text, Thing and the Historical Narrative of Beijing in the mid-seventeenth Century

Naixi Feng
Ph.D. Student, East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department, University of Chicago

In 1403, Beiping was elevated to the capital of the Ming Empire and designated as “Bei-jing.” Later on, Beijing experienced a transformation from a military-oriented political center to a culturally significant place, representable and appreciable as a literary milieu. How was the cultural image of Beijing gradually built up in the ending years of the Ming (1368-1644) through literary sketches of urban life? I would like to use the largest book project on Beijing from the Ming dynasty, A Sketch of Sites and Objects in the Imperial Capital (帝京景物略, 1635) as the central material. Focusing on the first essay “the Stone Drums at the Imperial Academy,” this presentation will explore the role of ancient ritual objects in the creation of a legitimate and historically discursive past of Beijing in the final years of the Ming dynasty. I will pursue the following questions: In what ways did these ritual objects endow this previous capital of three non-Chinese regimes (Liao, Jin, Yuan) with an intelligible, legitimate and monumental past? What’s the power of those illegible and mythical characters inscribed on the stone surface? And how did the ritual objects balance the cultural statuses of Beijing in the whole country before and after the Yongle emperor relocated the capital to Beijing in 1403?

Friday, May 27, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156
Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact xizh@uchicago.edu

Friday, May 20, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156

The Two-Thousand-Year Journey of the Goosefoot Lamp (Yanzudeng): Exoticism, Antiquarianism and Visual Redesign

Lu Pengliang
Henry A. Kissinger Curatorial Fellow, Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Goosefoot Lamp, Western Han dynasty (206BC – 9AD), Bronze, H. 35cm, Excavated in 1992 from Zibo, Shandong Province, Collection of the Zibo Museum

The goosefoot lamp (yanzudeng), a specific type of bronze lighting instrument, appeared in the late Warring States period and enjoyed intermittent interests from the third century BC to the nineteenth century. Following the Han dynasty (206BC-220AD), this type of lamp did not gain popularity again until the eleventh century, when Song-dynasty scholars and collectors re-discovered the form and treated examples as an important antique. In the following centuries, Chinese literati praised the form of the goosefoot lamp, enriched its cultural significance, and created new artwork based upon it. Instead of focusing on one time period and one medium, this study aims to explore the ever-changing meanings of the goosefoot lamp throughout the imperial Chinese history. Relying on recent archaeological discoveries, historical texts, and cross-media comparison, I aim to answer the following questions: Why were lamps cast in the shape of goosefeet, this being a very unusual design in the Chinese bronzes of the Qin and Han period? Why did lamps of this kind become collectable antiques from the Song period onward? And how did Qing-dynasty antiquarians and artists use this specific type of lamp to create new art forms?

Friday, May 20, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156
Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact xizh@uchicago.edu

Special Talk:

Monday, May 16, 4:30-6:30pm, CWAC157

This presentation will be held in Chinese.

精⾦金良墨—谈全形拓的沿⾰革与技法
Going 3D the Chinese Way: Full-form Rubbings of Bronze Vessels in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

CHEN Chao-Jung 陳昭容
Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan 中央研究院歷史語言研究所

Full-form rubbings first appeared in China in the mid 19^th century. It is a special reproduction method for recording decorations and shapes of bronze vessels that combines elements of sketching, drawing, rubbing, and paper-cutting in order to produce three-dimensional representations of bronzes on two-dimensional media. The method demands considerable skill and the process is laborious and time-consuming. Artisans routinely produced full-form rubbings in the form of painting scrolls for the literati clientele since the mid 19^th century. Many survived in the rubbing collections formed by Late Qing and Early Republican Era scholars. With the rise of modern photography, the tradition of full-form rubbings has been gradually replaced by the faster and more accessible reproduction technology. It is a dying art form carried on by a very small number of artisans today.

Professor Chen’s talk will focus on the history and development of full-form rubbings, including major artisans and their work, the new art form of combining full-form rubbings with traditional literati studio paintings, and the major full-form rubbing collections and their host institutes. She will also introduce briefly the techniques of full-form rubbing.

青銅器形體及紋飾的描寫，早期都以線條繪製為主。全形拓是十九世紀中葉興起的一種特別技藝，結合素描、繪畫、傳拓、剪紙，在平面的拓紙上傳達立體的青銅器形體與花紋。自攝影技術發達之後，需要高超技巧、慢工細作的青銅器全形拓，因傳承不易，成了希罕而珍貴的藝術品。本次演講將介紹宋代金石學興起及主要圖錄、全形拓的發展歷史，每個時期主要的拓工及作品、全形拓與繪畫結合成為廣受歡迎的博古畫、主要全形拓收藏單位，也將談談簡單全形拓技法。

Monday, May 16, 4:30-6:30pm, CWAC157
Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact xizh@uchicago.edu

Friday, April 1, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156

Making Images of Dharma

Dongshan Zhang
Ph.D. Student, Art History, University of Chicago

To deal with the coming of the Final Dharma, or mofa, people initiated different types of projects around the Northern dynasty (439 – 589). The Buddhist images and stone engravings in the Xiangtangshan caves, Yunju temple, and in the mountains in central Shandong area are representatives. A few of the stone engravings found on the boulders and slopes of the mountains in Shandong are made with characters of unusually large size. This essay reconsiders the nature of the Northern dynasty Buddhist stone engravings in Shandong, and suggests that the preservation of images of dharma in the Final Dharma period was the true aim of the Shandong large-character engravings.

Friday, April 1, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156
Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact xizh@uchicago.edu

Friday, March 11, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156

Water, Ice, Lapis Lazuli: The Making of a Buddhist Paradise through the Sixteen Meditations in Tang China 

Anne Feng
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History, University of Chicago

This paper provides new insights into the relationship between Buddhist meditation and images in medieval China by looking at 7^th to 8^th century illustrations of the Sixteen Meditations in Dunhuang caves. I demonstrate how these paintings provided new possibilities for depicting moments of metamorphosis pictorially. Drawing upon recent scholarship on Buddhist ‘visualization’ in East Asia, I will trace how imagery of the Sixteen Meditations was introduced and appropriated at Dunhuang and address the perplexing iconography of these paintings. Working against previous studies that treat the Sixteen Meditations as a linear step-by-step sequence, in which the meditator focuses on a static visual object in each meditation, I argue that the visual phenomena described in meditation manuals were constantly in flux. This emphasis on moments of metamorphosis is frequently captured by illustrations of the meditation on water, which is an important threshold moment for the meditator to envision the Western Pure Land. Reading contemporary mediation guides and tales of rebirth, I will show how the iconography of the Sixteen Meditations could be creatively stretched and condensed, and how these intricate manipulations allow us to understand how Pure Land transformation tableaux were understood as dream flight destinations in the Tang dynasty.

Friday, March 11, 4:30 to 6:30pm, CWAC156
Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact xizh@uchicago.edu