Presentations
Zhiyan Yang, “Exhibiting Contemporary Architecture of China: Experiments and Cross-Cultural Dialogues, 1995-2005”
Please join us next Wednesday, April 26, from 5–7 pm CT on Zoom for the third VMPEA workshop this spring, featuring:
Zhiyan Yang
PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago
Who will be presenting the paper
“Exhibiting Contemporary Architecture of China: Experiments and Cross-Cultural Dialogues, 1995-2005”
Discussant: Meng-Hsuan Lee
PhD Candidate, Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Wednesday, April 26, 2023
5:00–7:00 pm CT
*Please note that this is an online event and the unusual time. Please use this link to join the talk on Zoom. No registration is required. The password is “arch”.
Installation view of the New Urbanism: Pearl River Delta organized by Rem Koolhaas and graduate students from Harvard Graduate School of Design, Documenta X, Kassel, 1997.
Abstract
A renewed investment in displaying contemporary architecture of China emerged and destabilized the existing exhibitionary paradigm in the 1990s as a result of the country’s historic urbanization movement and the increasing engagement with international capital, information, and networks. The three case studies, New Urbanism: Pearl River Delta (1997), Cities on the Move I (1997), and the design proposal for the Times Museum featured in the Second Guangzhou Triennial (2005), examine a new sensitivity based on international and interdisciplinary interactions among architects, curators, artists, and institutions. Situating these examples within a perennial tension between exhibition as temporally and spatially confined cultural production and architecture as a more substantial and permanent medium within the urban environment, I argue that these exhibitions became loci of self-reflexive experimentation, through which contemporary Chinese architecture can be interpreted as a form of knowledge production, an on-site experience, and an agent to provide concrete social and cultural changes beyond the exhibition space.
Zhiyan Yang is a doctoral candidate specializing in the history of modern and contemporary East Asian Architecture. He received his BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2013 and MA from the University of Chicago in 2015.
Meng-Hsuan Lee 李孟瑄 joined the PhD program at Columbia in 2018. He studies modern architecture, with a focus on Japanese colonial architecture and urbanism in Taiwan. Using the framework of screen genealogies, his current project investigates the rise of façadism and urban media culture in Taiwanese cities during the Japanese colonial period, particularly in the 1920s and 30s. More broadly, he is interested in the intersection of architecture and media, global colonialisms, and architectural preservation. Prior to joining Columbia, Meng received his M.A. in Humanities (art history) from the University of Chicago, where he wrote his master’s thesis examining the politics of urban memory surrounding Shih-Shih South Village 四四南村, a controversial architectural preservation project in Taipei. Previously, he received his B.A. in Drama and Theatre from National Taiwan University, where he also worked as a scenic designer.
Wang Zonghui, “An Exploration on the spatial composition of the mKhar rdzong Cave in mKhar rtse Valley, mNga’ ris, Tibet”
Please join us on Monday, April 10, from 4:45 pm-6:45 pm CT for the second VMPEA workshop this spring, featuring:
Wang Zonghui
Visiting PhD Candidate, UChicago
Who will be presenting the paper
“An Exploration on the spatial composition of the mKhar rdzong Cave in mKhar rtse Valley, mNga’ ris, Tibet”
西藏阿里卡孜河谷帕尔宗坛城窟图像程序研究
*This event will be conducted in English.
Discussant: Xiaotian YIN
PhD Candidate, Harvard University
Monday, April 10, 2023
4:45–6:45 pm CT, CWAC 152
*Please note the date change. You can also use this link to join the talk on Zoom. No registration is required. The password is “arth”
North wall of mkhar rdzong cave (Photo: Wang Ruilei)
Abstract
mKhar rdzong cave is a Buddhist site located on the cliff of rdzong mountain in the mnga’ ris Region of the Tibet Autonomous Region in China. Discovered by archaeologists from Sichuan University and the Cultural Relics Administration Committee of Tibet Autonomous Region in 1996 and 1999, the cave is renowned for its stupa relics and distinctive visual program, which includes unique mandalas and intact ceiling decorations. This makes it a valuable subject for art historical research. In my previous work, I established that the cave is a “relic stupa (gdung rten) cave” that was created as part of Buddhist monks’ funeral rituals. In this paper, I will examine the iconographical program of the cave’s murals and argue how they express the concept of deliverance from suffering by this program. Furthermore, I will explore possible sources for such a design structure. Through this analysis, I hope to contribute to our understanding of the spiritual and artistic significance of this remarkable cave and to the broader study of Buddhist art and ritual practices in the region.
Wang Zonghui is a PhD candidate at the Center for Buddhist Art, School of Art and Archaeology, Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. Her research focuses on Sino-Tibetan Buddhist art, with a particular interest in the Western Himalayas, especially the mnga’ ris district of China.
Xiaotian YIN 尹筱天 is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University specializing in Buddhist art in Inner Asia and China from the tenth to the fourteenth century. Her dissertation, “Collecting Embers: Buddhist Art in Central Tibet in the Age of Fragmentation, from the tenth to the twelfth century,” investigates the transcultural entanglements of Buddhist art across Central Tibet, Song China, Tangut-Xixa, Nepal, and India during Tibet’s “Dark Age.”. Xiaotian is also interested in the Buddhist publishing and printing culture in Song, Liao, Tangut-Xixia, and Mongol-Yuan states. In 2022-2023, Xiaotian is a visiting scholar and a lecturer in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College.
Hope to see many of you there,
Lucien Sun and Li Jiang
VMPEA Coordinators, 2022–2023
Anthony Stott, Nov 18
Please join us tomorrow for the fourth VMPEA workshop of this quarter, featuring:
Anthony Stott
PhD Candidate, East Asian Languages & Civilizations and Comparative Literature, UChicago
“Context After the End of Monumental Public Space: Toward an Archipelagic Reimagining of Urban Resistance in the Theory and Design of Isozaki Arata”
Discussant: Zhiyan Yang
PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago
Friday, November 18, 2022
6:00–8:00 pm CT, Zoom
Zoom Link: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/99126706613?pwd=WUhpT1JxQjR2bHB3Zjd5VFIzNlVWZz09
Please note the unusual date and time. This is a remote event.
**There are pre-circulated paper and slides for this workshop. You can find them in the other post with password “context”.
★Co-Sponsored by Art & Politics of East Asia workshop★
Jacques Derrida questioning Isozaki Arata and Asada Akira after Isozaki and Asada’s joint-presentation at the Anyone conference on May 11, 1991.
Abstract
The expulsion of protestors from Shinjuku Station West Exit Plaza in 1969 conventionally marks the end of monumental public space as a site for urban protests in Japan. Departing from this moment, this chapter explores the wanderings of the architect and theorist Isozaki Arata (1931–) in search of new sites for urban resistance. Isozaki builds on his earlier work on the environment and the cybernetic city to theorize this urban resistance as an alternative context that constructively short circuits the urban network, and he terms this “extra-context.” Putting into dialogue scholarship from across media studies, architectural theory, and urban history, I contend that Isozaki adopts extra-context not only to disrupt the unrestrained and homogenizing flows of information networks under globalization but also to oppose a transparency between built space and the environment as epitomized in imperialist architectural projects of the interwar period. Drawing on Isozaki’s writings in “Japanese-ness” in Architecture (Kenchiku ni okeru “nihonteki na mono,” 2003; first partially serialized in Critical Space between 1998 and 2000) and especially his extensive collaborations with the critic Asada Akira (1957–), I furthermore show how tracing Isozaki’s design via extra-context discloses a shift in his approach—from the eclectic citation of global forms in projects of the 1980s like Tsukuba Center, to the archipelagically derived performance halls of the 1990s. I thus aim to expand the critical possibilities of Isozaki’s work by attending to how the tethering of extra-context to the archipelagic resonates with and defies ecocriticism and other related discourses that explore the relation between ocean and media.
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Anthony Stott is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages & Civilizations and Comparative Literature who specializes in contemporary Japanese literature, media, and thought. His dissertation considers formations of artists and intellectuals around the preeminent Japanese-language journal of theory and criticism Critical Space (Hihyō kūkan, 1991–2002) through the lens of critique and its limits.
Zhiyan Yang is a doctoral candidate specializing in the history of modern and contemporary East Asian Architecture. He is currently completing a dissertation on post-socialist architecture through the lenses of architectural media and cultural production, including exhibitions, journals, history surveys and its intersection with contemporary visual culture and art. He received his BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2013 and MA from the University of Chicago in 2015. Zhiyan served as a researcher and overseas liaison of the Contemporary Chinese Art Yearbook Project spearheaded by Peking University and the University of Chicago since 2015. He has also previously interned at Xu Bing Studio in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Xu Jin, May 6
Speaker: Xu Jin ( Assistant Professor of Art History and Asian Studies, Vassar College)
“Comparing Acts, Matching Images: Filial Sons and Reclusive Sages on the Funerary Couch of a Sogdian Immigrant in 6th-Century China”
May 6th, 2022 (Friday)
4:30 – 6:30 pm CT. Hybrid (In-person at CWAC 152 + livestream via Zoom)
※ Please use this link to register for the zoom meeting if you would like to attend remotely. password: sogdian56
(Liu Ling, One of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, Di Yu Couch. Eastern Wei Dynasty. Stone couch from Anyang, Henan Province. Shenzhen Museum)
Abstract:
Filial sons and reclusive sages (Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove and Rong Qiqi) were among the most esteemed figural subjects in Chinese art. They also appear on the stone funerary couch of Di Yu 翟育 (?-538), a Sogdian diplomat who immigrated to North China in the early sixth century. The Di Yu couch is the earliest known of over ten sarcophagi made for Sogdian leaders active in sixth-century China. This talk demonstrates how the quintessential Chinese subjects were selectively adopted and meticulously modified to address the Sogdian family’s life experiences. Moreover, I argue that Sogdian immigrants employed the images of reclusive sages to reconcile their Central Asian origin with the art and culture of native Chinese elites.
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Xu Jin is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Asian studies at Vassar College. He received his PhD in art history at the University of Chicago. His research has been focusing on religious and cultural exchanges on the Silk Road as reflected in Chinese art during the 6th and 7th centuries. His publications appear in the Burlington Magazine, the Journal of Asian Studies, and Journal of National Museum of China. Currently he is writing a book manuscript titled “Beyond Boundaries: Sogdian Sarcophagi and the Art of An Immigrant Community in 6th Century China”.
Yan Yang, April 20
The recording of this event could be found HERE
Speaker: Yan Yang
(Assistant Professor of Art History, Music and Art, Borough of Manhattan Community College CUNY)
“Tracing the Formation of a National Style: Yamato-e from World Fairs to Wartimes”
Discussant: Minori Egashira (PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago)
April 20th, 2022 (Wednesday), 4:45 – 6:45 pm CT, Remotely via Zoom
Please use this link to register for the zoom meeting. The password to this zoom session is “yamatoe”
Tale of Genji Picture Scroll, Sekiya Chapter. 12th century. Tokugawa Art Museum
Abstract: How does a national style come into existence? Does it form through a consensus by a panel of experts or in some other way? Although yamato-e has been characterized as a national style of Japanese art since the 1930s by Japanese art historians, what led to this codification? This presentation examines primary sources produced before the 1930s, from government-sponsored exhibitions intended to teach a foreign audience about Japanese culture at World Fairs, to Japanese texts about surviving works of art that are celebrated as extant examples of yamato-e such as the Tale of Genji Picture Scrolls, in order to trace the formation of yamato-e as the pictorial embodiment of the Japanese national style.
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Yan Yang received her B.A and Ph.D degrees from Yale University. After teaching at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and at Kyushu University in Japan, she is currently at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her primary field of interest in Japanese art historiography and epistemology. She has published on the 20th-century codification of the concept of Japanese art known as yamato-e. This presentation is an extension of a larger project that explores the formation of yamato-e before the 20th century.
Minori Egashira is a PhD candidate studying under Dr. Chelsea Foxwell at The University of Chicago. Her research focuses on Meiji-period (1868–1912) sculpture, and Japan’s artistic interactions with the world in modern and contemporary times. Her broader interests include East Asian sculptural art and other three-dimensional objects, World Fairs, and investigating non-orthodox narratives of Japanese art history.
Sooa Im McCormick, June 2
Speaker: Sooa Im McCormick (Curator of Korean Art, Cleveland Museum)
“Korean Paper, a Trendy Item in Late Ming Literati Circle“
Discussant: Yoon-Jee Choi (PhD student, Department of Art History)
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021
4:45 – 6:45 pm CST, Zoom meeting (please find the registration link below)
Abstract:
Any wars result in, not to mention significant loss of life, economic destruction, and human dislocation, but also opportunities for unexpected cultural and material transfers. Korean papers of variety including Mirror Surface Paper 鏡面紙, White Silky Paper 白綿紙 were among stable tributary gifts to the Ming imperial court, but during the Japanese invasion (1592-1598) they were increasingly demanded than before. These imported Korean papers were not exclusively used in the imperial court, but soon gained a new life as a trendy commodity when it entered the circle of leading literati artists such as Dong Qichang.
By locating Korean paper in the material world of late Ming-period literati artists, this research attempts to uncover how gift-exchange in a tributary system between China and Korea fashioned new artistic identities of Korean paper, to examine what materialistic features of Korean paper led late Ming artists to involve it in their artistic endeavors, such as the case of Dong Qichang’s River and Mountains on a Clear Autumn Day 江山秋霽圖 in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and finally to highlight the role of Korean imports in Chinese visual and material culture.
Dong Qichang 董其昌, River and Mountains on a Clear Autumn Day 江山秋霽圖 (1624–27), Handscroll: Ink on Korean paper, Painting only: 38.4 x 136.8 cm, The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Zoom Registration Link:
https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwrduiqqDoqGdOs4gbVEO7AQKb2sS5r_zz2
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting (Recently, Zoom confirmations also tend to be categorized as Spam. Please also check your spam box for the confirmation email.).
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Dr. Sooa Im McCormick is Curator of Korean Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She holds a PhD from the University of Kansas and a Master’s degree from Rutgers University. Recently, she curated the exhibitions Interpretation of Materiality: Gold (4/30/2021-10/24/2021), as well as Gold Needles: Korean Embroidery Arts (3/8/2020-10/25/2020). While pursuing her curatorial career, Dr. McCormick remains active as a cutting-edge scholar. Her publications include “Re-Reading the Imagery of Tilling and Weaving of Eighteenth-Century Korean Genre Painting in the Context of the Little Ice Age,” in Anthology of Mountains and Rivers (without) End: Eco-Art History in Asia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019) and “The Politics of Frugality: Environmental Crisis and Eighteenth-Century Korean Visual Culture,” in Forces of Nature (Cornell University Press, 2022).
Yoon-Jee Choi is a PhD student whose research revolves around material culture and inter-regional influence within East Asian art history, particularly concentrating on the latter half of Joseon Dynasty and modern Korean art history. She received her BA in Division of International Studies and History of Art from Ewha Womans University. She has completed her coursework for her MA in History of Art and is currently working on her thesis on Korean monkey paintings during the late Joseon Dynasty. She has interned for the National Museum of Korea and worked as a research assistant for the Asian Museum Institute in Seoul. Her current interests lie in Korean paintings that reflect diverse foreign interactions during the late 19th century.
RAVE + VMPEA | QP Symposium Part One and Two: May 12 and 19
Speakers (PhD Students, Art History Department):
Part One (May 12th, 2021):
Jenny Harris, “Worlds of Wire: Ruth Asawa’s Sculpture” (4:45 – 5:15 PM)
Li Jiang, “Replicating Death: The Gold Funerary Mask of Princess of the State of Chen (1018)” (5:15 – 5:45 PM)
Stephanie Strother, “‘Fashionable Things’: The Designs and Designers of the Atelier Martine” (5:45 – 6:15 PM)
*Overall discussion is from 6:15 – 6:45 PM
Wednesday, May 12th, 2021
4:45 – 6:45 pm CST, Zoom Registration Link (resister here)
Part Two (May 19th, 2021):
Lucien Sun, “A Print in Flux: Rethinking the Print of Guan Yu from Khara-Khoto” (4:45 – 5:15 PM)
Lex Ladge, “Hieronian Impositions: Space and Policy in 3rd Century BCE Syracuse” (5:15 – 5:45 PM)
Adriana Obiols Roca, “Mesótica II: Central American Art After ‘Latin America’” (5:45 – 6:15 PM)
* Overall discussion is from 6:15 – 6:45 PM
Wednesday, May 19th, 2021
4:45 – 6:45 pm CST, Zoom Registration Link (resister here)
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting (Recently, Zoom confirmations also tend to be categorized as Spam. Please also check your spam box for the confirmation email.).
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Jenny Harris is a Ph.D. student focusing on 20th-century art. Her research interests include performance, intersections of dance and visual arts, and the status of decoration and craft in postwar American art. Prior to arriving at the University, she worked in The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Painting and Sculpture where most recently she participated in the reinstallation of the collection galleries and co-organized the exhibition The Shape of Shape, Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman (2019, with Michelle Kuo). She has also contributed to the exhibitions The Long Run (2017-18), Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends (2017), and One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North (2015). Jenny graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in Art History in 2012.
Li Jiang is a Ph.D. student of East Asian art history, focusing primarily on funerary art in ancient and early medieval China. Li Jiang received her MA from the University of Chicago in 2018. Her thesis examined the fragments of a lacquer screen from an elite burial of the Northern Wei dynasty. Her current research involves the material cultural and inter-regional issues in northeast Asian tomb arts from the fourth to seventh centuries.
Stephanie Strother is a Ph.D. student focusing on art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research interests include the relationship between art and craft at the turn of the century, popular reception and consumption, and global circuits of visual and material culture. She earned a BA from Carleton College in 2010 and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2017. From 2017 to 2019 she was the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies Graduate Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago. In this role she authored curatorial entries and an essay for a digital catalogue on the museum’s collection of paintings and drawings by James McNeill Whistler, which was published in 2020.
Lucien Sun is a Ph.D. student of East Asian visual and material culture at the University of Chicago. His current research interests lie broadly in Chinese art from the tenth to seventeenth century, especially the visual and material culture in northern China during the Jin–Yuan periods and its exchange with Central and West Asia. He recently co-wrote with the COSI Rhoades Curatorial Intern Yang Zhiyan a blog article for the Art Institute of Chicago titled “A Seamless Painting Simply Does Not Exist” that demonstrates how paper seams of a Yuan dynasty handscroll may shed new light on the painting’s composition, material medium, and conservation history. He has also written about images of filial piety stories at tombs in north China during the Yuan period. He received his BA at Fudan University, Shanghai.
Lex Ladge is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History. She studies Greek and Roman art and architecture, with a focus on urbanism and spatial experiences in the Hellenistic and Imperial Roman periods.
Adriana Obiols Roca is a Ph.D. student studying modern art of Latin America. Her research focuses on Central American art from the second half of the twentieth century. Adriana holds an MA in art history from Tulane University (2019) and a BA in English Literature from Swarthmore College (2016). Her MA thesis, “‘Para el ala y para el vuelo’: Photography and Nation in Revista Alero”, centered on the interaction between photography and student nationalism in 1970s Guatemala.
Wang Lianming, May 7
Speaker: Wang Lianming (Assistant Professor of Chinese Art History, Heidelberg University)
“Revisiting the Jesuit Gardens in Eighteenth-Century Beijing”
Discussant: Yin Wu (PhD candidate, Art History, The University of Chicago)
May 7th (Friday), 2021
12-2pm CDT, Zoom meeting (please find the registration link below)
Abstract:
In the early modern world, the Jesuit gardens arguably became a transcultural phenomenon mate-rializing the transfer of elite knowledge, culture, and ideas. Drawing on a variety of recently un-covered materials from Paris and St. Petersburg, this talk discusses the crucial role of the Beijing Jesuit gardens played in the early-modern dynamics of botanical and horticultural practices. This is achieved by examining their functions as walk-in spaces of transcultural experience, experi-mental spaces of artistic entanglements, and places of fruitful encounters of knowledge. These garden sites, as I will argue, were the missing link between European Renaissance culture and knowledge, Qing court art, and collecting practices of the European Jesuit patrons.
The panoramic view of the Jesuit Beitang residence and its garden space, color on paper, ca. 1830/31. St. Petersburg, Kunstkamera – Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, inventory number 667-261.
Zoom Registration Link:
https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMlf-uqqzsoHNNslm-puhmFJ_6LP6hmuXjZ
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting (Recently, Zoom confirmations also tend to be categorized as Spam. Please also check your spam box for the confirmation email.).
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Wang Lianming is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Art History at Heidelberg University. His areas of research include early-modern global encounters of arts and culture and artistic practices and materiality related to transterritorial animals. Wang has taught at the University of Würzburg and was a Postdoc Fellow (2018/19) of the research group “Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices” at the Berlin-based Forum Transregional Studies, led by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Society. Wang has organized many workshops and conferences related to Sino-European exchanges, including The Jesuit Legacies: Images, Visuality, and Cosmopolitanism in Qing China (chief organizer, 2015), Reframing Chinese Objects: Practices of Collecting and Displaying in Europe and the Islamic World, 1400-1800 (co-organizer, 2018), and Before the Silk Road: Eurasian Interactions in the First Millennium BC (chief-organizer, 2019). He was awarded the Klaus-Georg and Sigrid Hengstberger Prize by the Heidelberg University in 2018, and the Academy Prize by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2021.
Yin Wu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History. Her research focuses on the cross-cultural exchange of objects between China and the West at the Qianlong Emperor’s court in the 18th century, exploring how the Western objects were transformed into new visual and material forms and create new political and cultural meanings in the Qing empire.
Zhenru Zhou, Apr 21st
The VMPEA Workshop is pleased to welcome Zhenru Zhou (PhD candidate, Art History) as our next speaker to share her project “Anarchitectonic pagoda images from late-medieval Dunhuang.” We are also very happy to have Dr. Katherine Tsiang (Associate Director, Center for the Art of East Asia) serving as the discussant.
Please watch the Panopto Presentation in advance to join the Zoom session:
https://uchicago.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=b12cf952-1946-4f5a-9e88-ad10002ae20f
Please note this VMPEA session will take a slightly different format and start at a different time:
Wednesday, Apr 21st, 2021
5:30-6:45 pm CDT,
Zoom session for response and questions only (please find the registration link below)
Abstract:
Among the numerous portable artifacts found at the Dunhuang Caves, some are particularly indicative of the production of the unportable art and architecture, namely, the decorated Buddhist cave-temple. While the Dunhuang artists’ sketches and stencils in general have been associated with figural representations as seen in wall paintings and mandalic designs for ceilings or altars, it remains understudied how the cave architecture has been designed, conceptualized, and implemented. In response to the question, this paper explores a curious design trend of de-emphasizing the architectonic construct of an architectural space, which is evident in portable paintings, reliquaries, mural paintings and repaintings, caves, and even cave groups in late-medieval Dunhuang. In particular, the paper juxtaposes a few little-studied drawings originally deposited in the Dunhuang Library Cave with the repainted murals that later concealed the cave to unveil the dialectic relationship between image-making and cave-making. In addition, the study of cross-media artistic practices at Dunhuang will shed new light on a paradigm shift in visualizing the Buddhist Pure Lands in northwest China of the 10-11th centuries.
Picture of Many Sons Pagoda, ink on paper, 41.6 x 28 cm, 9th-10th century CE. Deposited in Mogao Cave 17, Dunhuang, China, now in the National Museum, New Delhi, India.
Zoom Registration Link:
https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtdeisqzosG9WvBmr4gKmFx6qB36wYnMK3
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting (Recently, Zoom confirmations also tend to be categorized as Spam. Please also check your spam box for the confirmation email.).
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Zhenru Zhou studies Buddhist art and architecture in China and along the Silk Roads, with a focus on cave-temples in Northwest China. She received an M. Arch degree from Princeton University in 2016, and another M. Arch and a B. Arch degree from Tsinghua University (China). Her dissertation project, titled “Between the Virtual and the Real: A New Architecture of the Mogao Caves (Dunhuang, China) in 781-1036 CE,” explores the complexity of cave architecture regarding its hybrid materiality and visuality, construction and reconstruction over time.
Katherine R. Tsiang is a scholar of Chinese art of the Medieval Period, a period of extensive multicultural interaction during which the northern part of China was controlled predominantly by non-Han Chinese rulers and Buddhism, initially introduced from India and Central Asia, became the predominant religion. Her recent research has focused on the art and visual culture of Chinese tombs and Buddhist cave shrines and deals with the transformative impact of multicultural, social, religious, and funerary ideologies on artistic production of the fifth through eighth centuries.