Past Tang Center Lecture Series
Fall 2008 Icons, Rituals, and Paths to Salvation: Three Lectures on the History of Japanese Buddhist Sculpture
Tang Center Lecture Series Monday, 13 October 2008 Wednesday, 15 October 2008 Thursday, 16 October 2008 4:30 pm, 101 McCormick Hall
John Rosenfield Professor Emeritus, Harvard University |
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Three lectures on Japanese Buddhist sculpture raise questions about the ritual function of works of art in times of extreme social upheaval and the effects of social change on artistic patronage and practice. The first two lectures focus on statues commissioned by the monk Shunjobo Chogen (1122-1206) in a period of intense religious turmoil, while the third explores sculpture created in the 15th and 16th centuries as Japanese state patronage of Buddhism declined.
Lecture 1. Bloody Mayhem Monday, 13 October 2008 4:30 pm, 101 McCormick Hall Buddhist statues produced during the brutal civil wars of the late twelfth century provoke questions about the effects of carnage and disruption on Buddhist sculptors and on the function of their sculpture in rituals intended to bring solace to the victims and their families.
Lecture 2. Japan and China Wednesday, 15 October 2008 4:30 pm, 101 McCormick Hall An examination of the transmission of rituals and craft techniques from China, especially from the Zhejiang region, leads to an exploration of their impact on Buddhist sculptors and builders of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Lecture 3. The Very End of the Law Thursday, 16 October 2008 4:30 pm, 101 McCormick Hall The Buddhist creed lost its place at the fulcrum of Japanese state polity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, prompting questions about changes in the status of Buddhist sculptors and in the ritual function of their images. |
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Fall 2007 Body Talk in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen
Tang Center Lecture Series Tuesday, 9 October 2007 Thursday, 11 October 2007 4:30 pm, 101 McCormick Hall
Jerome Silbergeld Professor, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University |
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Jiang Wen, China’s most popular male actor, has directed two of China’s most honored films. In the Heat of the Sun was the box-office champion of 1994 and swept the Golden Horse awards: best film, actor, director, screenplay, cinematography, and sound. Devils on the Doorstep won the Jury Grand Prix at Cannes in 2000. But today, Heat has become unavailable in China and elsewhere, while Jiang Wen was banned from further directing for five years after Devils, which has never been screened in China. Treated separately because of their sharply contrasting styles, these two works demonstrate a filmmaker’s mastery of cinematic possibilities, unsurpassed in Chinese film today. Taken together as an intentional pairing by a meticulous craftsman of the narrative medium, these two films surreptitiously but powerfully undermine the twin pillars of the Communist Party’s historical claim to legitimacy in China.
Lecture 1. Body Visible Tuesday, 9 October 2007 4:30 pm, 101 McCormick Hall In the Heat of the Sun is the very definition of cinematic subversion. Set in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, it is a story of children of the elite whose parents and elder siblings have been sent out to engage in Mao’s war on traditional culture, abandoning them to an ironic coming-of-age experience–as told by an inveterate liar.
Lecture 2. Naming the Beast Thursday, 11 October 2007 4:30 pm, 101 McCormick Hall Set in the last year of the War Against Japan, Devils on the Doorstep is as raw, passionate, and violent as it is in-your-face philosophical. Just suppose that your mortal enemy is delivered to your doorstep, tied up in a burlap bag–what do you do then? |
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Spring 2007 Commemorative Landscape Painting in China
Tang Center Lecture Series Monday, 2 April 2007 Thursday, 5 April 2007 4:30 pm, 106 McCormick Hall
Anne Clapp Professor Emerita, Wellesley College |
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Lecture 1. Conspicuous Seclusion: Commemorative Landscape Painting in China Monday, 2 April 2007 4:30 p.m., 101 McCormick Hall Commemorative landscape painting is distinguished from the monumental painting that preceded it in the Song by the intention to celebrate a particular historical person, to make known his creditable achievements, and to win social status and recognition. This is an art of disguised portraiture in which the subject asserts himself, his ambition, and tastes, openly seeking acceptance and support from his peers. The value system of the literati social structure was so familiar to its members that the individual could address his audience through pictorial biography just as he had through literary biography for centuries. The setting for such pictures is always natural landscape, interpreted in many different moods and forms, but the landscape is secondary to the man, and its true function is to mirror him as the humanistic ideal of the recluse-scholar. The literary baggage attached to the new landscape increased during the Yuan dynasty, when the first commemorative paintings appeared, and flourished through the Ming, producing an art form that was simultaneously pictorial and verbal. This art was a direct descendant of the “social biography” of the past—eulogies, poems, prefaces—communicating personal experience to other men. It was also a direct descendent of Song and Yuan landscape styles now turned into a new world.
“What’s in a Name?”: The Biehao Painting in Chinese Landscape Thursday, 5 April 2007 4:30 p.m., 101 McCormick Hall A sub-type of commemorative painting concerned the biehao picture, name picture, which has much to say about the subjective nature of Chinese painting in the later dynasties. Chinese men had several names for use in different circumstances—family, formal, legal, and social. The biehao was a brush name, sobriquet, the only name he chose himself, and was chosen for reasons which only he knew. It was intended to set him apart from others, to convey something about him which was private and personal but which, nevertheless, the owner desired to be known to his class at large. It might be poetic, allusive, ironic, fanciful in many ways, but it was often concretely figurative and so could be illustrated in visual form. The earliest biehao paintings appear in the Yuan dynasty and reached their peak of popularity among Suzhou art patrons in the Ming dynasty. They flourished at a time when literati circles deplored literal illustration and sniffed at realism. They escaped both by hiding the identity of the owner in the colophons attached to the painting, one of which was a preface (xu) or explanation (bian) divulging the owner’s identity and explaining how he acquired his hao. The picture was constructed around a conundrum from the start and afforded the patron and painter both ample opportunity for the play of wit, irony, double meanings, and other anomalies more often associated with the world than with the image. |
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Winter 2004 Three Lectures on Chinese Art History
Tang Center Lecture Series Tuesday, 10 February 2004 Thursday, 12 February 2004 Monday, 16 February 2004
Wen C. Fong Professor Emeritus, Princeton University |
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In this special three-part lecture series, Wen C. Fong will present his current work toward a new book on Chinese art history for the general reader. In this study of Chinese painting and calligraphy, he will analyze the visual language developed by Chinese artists and offer interpretations of its distinctive language within the Chinese cultural context. Although Chinese painting and calligraphy have often been considered as the cultural “Other” from a Western perspective, or been viewed as less valuable than written texts from a Sinological perspective, Wen Fong will demonstrate instead how the study of Chinese painting and calligraphy can provide deep insight into Chinese culture. He will discuss issues of style and expressive content from the Chinese own art-historical perspective in order to offer fresh possibilities of criticism from Western art historiography.
Lecture 1. Chinese Art as Cultural History Tuesday, 10 February 2004 4:30 pm, 101 McCormick Hall
Lecture 2. Calligraphy and Painting as One Thursday, 12 February 2004 4:30 pm, 101 McCormick Hall
Lecture 3. Eastern Art with a Western Face Monday, 16 February 2004 4:30 pm, 101 McCormick Hall |
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