The Zoomorphic Visual Language of China’s Frontiers

The Zoomorphic Visual Language of China’s Frontiers: A View of Transcultural Entanglements in Inner Asia from the Iron Age to the Mongol Era

Numerous nomadic and semi-nomadic confederations flourished along the Chinese northern periphery from the middle of the first millennium BCE well into the 15^th century. Amid their intensive interactions with sedentary neighbors – namely China – steppe societies invented and circulated a unique approach to image-making. Loosely known in art-historical discourse as “animal style”, this zoomorphic visual language was inspired by the nomad’s psychology of mobility and their constantly shifting place in an increasingly interconnected cultural and political milieu. Steppe visuality was rooted in a metonymic mode of expression, creating an alternative ecological reality where animal bodies existed in a constant state of flux, metamorphosis, and “in-betweenness”. This study makes two primary observations. Firstly, it contends that this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became a shared political strategy and a coping mechanism for the elite nucleus of reluctant and culturally diverse nomadic alliances in the face of their geopolitical rival. The analysis will show that animal-style design was at the heart of a self-fashioning dilemma, as all Inner Asian societies, from the Xiongnu to the Mongols, wished to reconcile two distinct identities – that of a worldly politician in a global Eurasian milieu, and that of a fearsome warrior with a sacral connection to the steppe environment. Secondly, the lecture will demonstrate how steppe-inspired zoomorphic idioms permeated Chinese material and visual culture and became a new mode of framing the “nomadic Other” far beyond the northern zone – as far as China’s southern borders and distant outposts on the Korean Peninsula.

Date: 25th April 2025 (Friday)
Time: 3:30-5pm
Venue: Room 10.28, 10/f, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
Free seating

Speaker: Petya Andreeva

Petya Andreeva is an Assistant Professor of Asian Art History at Vassar College. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Andreeva is the author of the monograph “Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies” (Edinburgh, 2024), and the editor of the volume “The Zoomorphic Arts of Ancient Central Eurasia” (MDPI, 2023). Her work on cross-cultural exchange in ancient and medieval Chinese and Central Asian art has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Early China, Fashion Theory, Archaeological Research in Asia, to name a few, and her most recent work will be published in the Art Bulletin later this year. Her scholarship has also been featured on popular news outlets such as the History Channel and Voices on Central Asia. She is the recipient of several international awards, including UNESCO’s Silk Road Research Grant and the Getty-ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art. Dr. Andreeva has given talks at institutions worldwide, including Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study, Heidelberg, the American Center for Mongolian Studies, and the China Institute of America.