Colloquia
Symposium
April 30 – May 1, 2005
Recarving China's Past
The Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of the “Wu Family Shrines”
Organized by the Princeton University Art Museum in memory of Frederick W. Mote. Co-sponsored in part by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, the East Asian Studies Program and the P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art at Princeton University; with the support of the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, the History Department and the East Asian Library at the University of California at Berkeley.
This two-day international symposium will explore the architecture, artistic illustration, and material culture of the Han dynasty of China, 206 BCE–220 CE and accompanies the major exhibition of the same title at the Princeton University Art Museum. Focusing on a set of pictorial wall carvings that are commonly recognized as mid-second-century funerary structures belonging to the Wu family cemetery of the Han dynasty, the symposium will raise significant questions about how the Wu family shrine has been identified and understood by scholars in the past and how our understanding of Han art, architecture, history, and culture may require reevaluation.