Friday, January 21, 2022
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Live via Zoom

Zoom link: Register Here

Conceived and first presented at UCLA when he was a Getty scholar, Dr. Miao Zhe’s magnum opus Cong Lingguan dian dao Wu Liang ci：Liang Han zhijiao diguo yishu de yiying 從靈光殿到武梁祠：兩漢之交帝國藝術的遺影（From Lingguang Palace to Wu Liang Shrine：Traces of Imperial Art during the Turn of the Western and Eastern Han Dynasties）sets up a new milestone in the study of early Chinese art. In this webinar a group of art historians, archaeologists, literary scholars, and historians from UCLA and beyond will have a dialogue with the author and discuss their reading of the book. This event will conduct in both English and Chinese, is co-sponsored by Center for Chinese Studies and the book’s co-publisher Han Tang Yangguang.

Guest Speaker:
Miao Zhe（Professor of Chinese Art, Zhejiang University）

MIAO Zhe, Professor of Chinese Art History at School of Art and Archaeology at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou. His research focuses on early imperial art of China. He is also an accomplished essayist and translator.

Moderators:
LI Min（Associate Professor of Chinese Archaeology, UCLA）
LI Jing（Journalist and Author, Visiting Scholar at 21st Century China Center, UCSD）

LI Jing, Visiting Scholar at 21st Century China Center, UCSD, is a journalist and author with twenty years of experience reporting on cultural and social issues in China. She served as a reporter, editor, and the deputy editor-in-chief of Sanlian Life Week Magazine from 2003 to 2021. She also served as the publisher of Zhongdu, a news and knowledge-sharing app from 2018 to 2021. She is the author of ten books, including a biography of Sun Yat-sen and a 2015 collection of stories by witnesses to the normalization of U.S.-China relations. She was an Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow in 2001.

LI Min, Associate Professor of Chinese Archaeology, UCLA, whose archaeological research revolves around landscape archaeology, cultural interactions, social memory, and religious communication. His is author of Social Memory and State Formation in Early China published by the Cambridge University Press in 2018.

Participants:
Lothar von Falkenhausen（Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology, UCLA）
Hui-shu Lee（Professor of Chinese Art, UCLA）
Huijun Mai（Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature, UCLA）
Liang Cai（Associate Professor of Chinese History, University of Notre Dame）
Guolong Lai（Associate Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology, University of Florida）

Lothar von Falkenhausen, Professor of Chinese Archaeology and Art History at UCLA. His research concerns the archaeology of the Chinese Bronze Age, focusing on large interdisciplinary and historical issues on which archaeological materials can provide significant new information. He is the author of Suspended Music：Chime Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China （1993）and Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius（1000-250 BC）：The Archaeological Evidence （2006）.

Hui-shu LEE, Professor of Chinese Art History at UCLA. Her field of specialization is Chinese painting and visual culture in the pre-modern era, with a particular focus on gender issues. She also works extensively on representations of place, cultural mapping, and garden culture. She is the author of Exquisite Moments：West Lake & Southern Song Art （New York：China Institute, 2001）and Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China （Seattle：University of Washington Press, 2010）.

Huijun MAI, Assistant Professor of Pre-Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at UCLA. Her research focuses on the issue of canonization--the relations between high/elite literature and writings that were frown upon as low-brow, literary conventions and innovations. She writes on topics ranging from the writing of the everyday, the senses, the poetics of space, to medieval Sino-Japanese poetic and material cultural exchanges that occurred along with Buddhist monastic and commercial transactions during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Her current book project, tentatively titled “Thinking Things：The Material Turn in Song（960–1279）Literary Culture,” examines the rise of material culture in the literary discourse during the eleventh to thirteenth century and how that redefined the boundary of literature.

CAI Liang, Associate Professor of Chinese History at University of Notre Dame. She specializes in Chinese political and intellectual history. She is the author of Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire, which won the 2014 Academic Award for Excellence presented by Chinese Historians in the United States and was a finalist of 2015 Best First Book in the History of Religions presented by the American Academy of Religion.

Guolong LAI, Associate Professor of Chinese Art History, Archaeology, and Cultural Heritage at University of Florida. His research interests include early Chinese art and archaeology, Chinese paleography and Old Chinese phonology, museology, collecting history and provenance studies, and historic conservation in modern China. He is the author of Excavating the Afterlife：The Archaeology of Early Chinese Religion, published by the University of Washington Press 2015.

Up the River of Time：Qingming Shanghe as Painting Tradition

Wednesday, February 9, 2022
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Live via Zoom

Zoom link: Register Here

Very likely the most famous Chinese painting in the world and a household name in China, Qingming shanghe （Up the River during Qingming）, a late Northern Song handscroll attributed to Zhang Zeduan, had already gained a reputation as a legendary artwork in the late Ming period（ca. 1550s-1644）. One manifestation of such was the emergence of a huge number of paintings assuming the same title that were produced from the second half of the sixteenth century throughout the High Qing period（ca. 1680s-1795）. At the same time, these paintings with the title of Qingming shanghe formed one of the most discussed topics related to art in Ming-Qing China.

The old model of studying a painting and its so-called derivatives is to treat the painting as the original and see its influence upon later ones. My book project, instead, takes Qingming shanghe as a painting theme popular in early modern China, discusses the complicated relationship between the first known version and later ones, and then tackles issues that arise from the linkages between these paintings. In the process, two clusters of issues are involved. First, the book is about the formation of a theme and thematic transmission that demonstrates one way of understanding the Chinese painting tradition. As such, this book examines the long-term development of Chinese painting by means of theme and linked elements, such as brushwork, subject matter and iconographical details, that created a tradition over time. Second, the book investigates the historical contexts in which the theme of Qingming shanghe became viable and flourished. It delves into the “Qingming shanghe” phenomenon that became integral to the rise of city views in the late Ming, to the mass production of fake paintings in the early modern period, and to the establishment of benchmarks for Qing dynasty（1644-1911）court painting. It also examines the cultural resonances associated with the theme that made it popular and historically meaningful.

The book takes the Northern Song version as a starting point but does not treat it as a classical work that emanates all of the associated meanings about the theme. It deals with the dating and possible original meaning of this painting and its afterlife in the period from the twelfth century to the High Qing period, but it does not make the “biography” of the painting as the only storyline, as some other authors do when dealing with a classic painting. Rather, it is a story about how one painting became a painting theme--from one to many; how a primordial version was linked to later ones; and how a painting tradition was established and transformed with codified and reinterpreted formal features and cultural resonances. Qingming shanghe as a painting theme provides a valuable case in the study of Chinese art to discuss not only how one painting went through history and was re-imagined at different historical moments, but also how thematic transmission sheds light on what we know about the Chinese painting tradition. In a nutshell, the important question asked is how a painting, originally as a material object existing somewhere in a collection, entered the cultural realm and was associated with clusters of notions and imageries.

Cheng-hua Wang, a specialist in Chinese painting and visual culture, joined the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in 2016 as an associate professor. She was previously Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei. Wang has published widely in both Chinese and English. Her English-language publications appear in the journals Archives of Asian Art, The Art Bulletin, Artibus Asiae, and Nan Nü：Men, Women, and Gender in Early and Imperial China. She has also contributed to a number of edited volumes including Handbook of the Colour Print in China 1600- 1800, Reinventing the Past：Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture, and The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art. She is currently working on two book projects. The first focuses on the painting theme Qingming shanghe （Up the River during Qingming）, tackling issues regarding the construction of a painting history through thematic links, the complicated relationship between a primordial artwork and its later derivatives, and the rise of city views in late sixteenth-century China. The second investigates the city views and landscape painting of eighteenth-century China.

Reconstruction of the Kam ethnic identity and culture in contemporary China：A discourse-oriented ethnographic study

Sponsor（s）: Center for Chinese Studies