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Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia is proud to present our schedule for Winter 2019

All sessions unless otherwise noted will take place on Fridays 4:30-6:30pm in the Cochrane-Woods Art Center (CWAC) Room 156

January 25, Minori Egashira, Ph. D Student

Department of Art History, University of Chicago

“Risō Sculptures in Meiji Japan: Takenouchi Hisakazu’s Gigeiten and the Nihonga Style.”

February 8, Yueling Ji, Ph. D Student

Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

“Queering the Sino-Soviet Alliance Posters.”

February 21, Jenny Lee.

(Cancelled).

March 1, Jeehey Kim, Postdoctoral Instructor

Department of Art History, University of Chicago

“Funerary Photo-portraiture in East Asia.”

March 1, (Special Joint Event with APEA)So Hye Kim, PhD Candidate,

EALC, University of Chicago

“Beyond the Divided Korea: Zhang Lu’s Dooman River (2009)”

We look forward to your attendance and hope you will share this with all who might also be interested in joining our community. Please direct questions and inquiries to Dongshan Zhang at dongshan@uchicago.edu.

4:30pm at CWAC 156.

Title: “Framing Gandhāran Art: Space Construction in Narrative Reliefs”

The question of influence in the buddhist art of Gandhāra, a region comprising part of modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, has been the object of heated debate for decades: the quest for sources – of style, of imagery, of content – has been variously identified in Greece, Rome, Parthia, India. In an effort to both move away from and reassess the thorny issue of influence, this paper brings the physical and conceptual margin at the center, and focuses on framing devices. Specifically, it will investigate the employment of architectural elements at the boundaries and as the boundaries of devotional space in narrative reliefs that were once attached to stupas. It will be argued in favour of the necessity of a critical and systematic evaluation of the style and meaning of these framing devices within the cultural milieu of early Buddhist art in the north-western Indian regions.

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Dongshan Zhang at dongshan@uchicago.edu

4:30pm at CWAC 156.

Title: A Garden Painting during the Bloody Donglin Purge ca. 1625-1627

Abstract: Significant research in recent decades illuminates how officials in Ming imperial China (1368–1664) climbed the social ladder through collegial garden festivities, and how garden paintings, ​as ​commemorative byproducts of these gatherings, integrate natural beauty and political harmony. This paper expands upon existing scholarship by exploring a different type of garden painting, one that portrays properties constructed during the imperial massacre of 1625–1627. In an era scarred by blood, factional struggles, and eunuch persecutions against Donglin Academy members, gardens owned and named by Donglin sympathizers covertly broadcast camouflaged political messages. This paper uses the garden painting for Chen Jiru as a case study to show that some late-Ming gardens served as private refuges from political murders, as well as protests against imperial violence targeting Donglin scholars.

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Dongshan Zhang at dongshan@uchicago.edu

(This event is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies of University of Chicago)

Best Regards,

Dongshan

November 9. 4:30pm at CWAC 156.

Title: “Mokuan’s Four Sleepers: The Ultimate Zen Painting.”

Abstract: The twelfth through fourteenth centuries witnessed a flourishing Chan/Zen macroculture that spanned the China Sea in all directions and witnessed thousands of Japanese monks travel to monastic centers in the Jiangnan region for study and training. The legacy of the monk-painters that emerged within this interregional sphere are preserved in scores of ink paintings in Japanese collections. This lecture does a deep dive into the artistry of the Zen monk-painter through a reading of Mokuan Reien’s The Four Sleepers (Shisui zu 四睡図), one of the most celebrated works of its kind. Mokuan’s painting showcases several of the unique ways in which Zen painting developed subject matter, appropriated folkloric visual culture, paired words and images in complementary (or more often contradictory) ways, and positioned itself in mutualism to literati painting.

(This program is sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies)

Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia is proud to present our schedule for Fall 2018

All sessions unless otherwise noted will take place on Fridays 4:30-6:30pm in the Cochrane-Woods Art Center (CWAC) Room 156

October 5, Yoon-Jee Choi, Ph. D Student

Department of Art History, University of Chicago

“The Voyage of the Soy Sauce Bottle: The Material Culture of Comprador Bottles.”

November 9, Yukio Lippit, Professor of History of Art and Architecture Japanese Art,

Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University

“The Ultimate Zen Painting: Mokuan’s Four Sleepers.”

November 16, Huiping Pang, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoc Fellow

Department of Asian Art, The Art Institute of Chicago

“A Garden-Painting during the Bloody Donglin Purge ca. 1625-1627.”

(Location TBD)

December 7, Alice Casalini, Ph. D Student

Department of Art History, University of Chicago

“Framing Gandhāran Art: Space Construction in Narrative Reliefs.”

We look forward to your attendance and hope you will share this with all who might also be interested in joining our community. Please direct questions and inquiries to Dongshan Zhang at dongshan@uchicago.edu.

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.

Friday, March 2,  4:30 – 6:30 pm, CWAC 152

“Current Encounters: Water Imagery in John La Farge’s Japan-Inspired Works”

Professor Noriko Murai

Associate Professor, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Graduate Program in Global Studies, Sophia University

John La Farge (1835-1910), A Rishi Calling Up a Storm, 1897, watercolor and gouache over graphite. Cleveland Museum of Art.

This paper examines the blending of nature and culture that frequently appears in the Japan-inspired works by the American artist John La Farge (1835-1910). In demonstrating the recurrence of water imagery in these works, it proposes that the natural element of water was not only central to La Farge’s imagination of East Asia, but also enabled the artist to visualize an intermediary realm “where the edges of the real and the imaginary melt.” His exploration of such cross-cultural space where ordinary boundaries became destabilized was moreover mediated by Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉 覚三 (aka Tenshin 天心, 1863-1913), the Japanese art historian and critic who became his lifelong friend. In the existing studies on La Farge, Okakura has typically been assigned the role of a “native informant” who taught the American the principles of East Asian philosophy. This paper challenges this one-sided account and demonstrates that their relationship was more synergetic.

Friday, February 16,  4:30 – 6:30 pm, CWAC 152

Architecture and/or Miniature? The Informative Ambiguity of the Zhakou White Pagoda

Jiayi Zhu

Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

The Zhakou White Pagoda before sunset in December, 2017.

This paper is a case study of the Zhakou White Pagoda閘口白塔 (the white pagoda at the sluice gate) in Hangzhou. This 14-meter stone pagoda has been standing at the intersection of Qiantang River and Zhonghe River since the Wuyue Kingdom (907–978 CE). It is an octagonal structure imitating the timber-frame louge (pavilion) style pagoda. Rather than calling it architecture, scholars refer to it as a sculpture or a model. Why is this pagoda constructed in this specific way, larger than a conventional sculpture but smaller than a wooden-structured real pagoda? What aspects of the pagoda contributed to this ambiguity? And how this ambiguity influenced interactions between viewers and the Zhakou White Pagoda? What about the functions of this pagoda? These are some questions I will try to address.

Friday, February 16,  4:30 – 6:30 pm, CWAC 152

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Nancy P. Lin (nancyplin@uchicago.edu)