BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Art History @HKU - ECPv6.13.2.1//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://arthistory.hku.hk
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Art History @HKU
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:Asia/Hong_Kong
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:+0800
TZOFFSETTO:+0800
TZNAME:HKT
DTSTART:20250101T000000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20250422T153000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20250422T170000
DTSTAMP:20260902T194810
CREATED:20250414T070142Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250415T030323Z
UID:12530-1745335800-1745341200@arthistory.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Decontextualization\, Reconfiguration and Symbolization
DESCRIPTION:Decontextualization\, Reconfiguration and Symbolization: Reinventing Pensive Bodhisattvas in Early Medieval China (3rd to 6th c.)\nImages of pensive bodhisattva were produced in various Silk Routes regions from Gandhāra to Central Asia\, China\, Korea and Japan. His identity in each area is highly controversial. I argue that the key threshold of pensive image existed in fifth- and sixth century China\, where he was placed in some new pictorial contexts. These contexts suggest contradicting identities of him including Siddhartha (悉達多\, pre-enlightened Sākyamuni)\, Maitreya [彌勒] and several types of devotees/practitioners related to them. \nThis paper examines the shifting meanings of pensive bodhisattva. I propose that unlike its counterparts in Gandhāra and Central Asia\, pensive bodhisattva in China never exist within a full representation of Siddhartha watching the ploughing event and experiencing his first meditation\, whose repertoire typically includes farmers\, bulls and kneeling Śuddhodana [淨飯王]. I argue that pensive bodhisattva no longer embodies Siddhartha in the moment of evoking bodhicitta\, the compassionate mind to rescue all beings from suffering. Instead\, it had been decontextualized from the original narrative and constructed as a visual sign pointing at the Bodhisattva path\, a trajectory starting at the bodhicitta moment and culminating at the attainment of Buddhahood. \nIn 470s\, pensive bodhisattvas were incorporated into the iconography of Tuśita Heaven [兜率天] as attending figures flanking Maitreya to elevate Tuśita’s status to a quasi-Pure Land\, by visually connecting a rebirth in Tuśita with attaining Buddhahood. In sixth century\, pensive bodhisattvas were depicted as focal images within donor portraits/processions and later created as independent icons. I consider they embody the guaranteed\, future Buddhahood of the principal donors. In other words\, pensive bodhisattva is an “iconic narrative”: an anthropomorphic embodiment of the key morality behind the narrative of the historical Buddha’s life that we all Mahāyana [大乘] believers pursue our liberation by following and reenacting the trajectory of Sākyamuni Buddha. \nDate: 22nd April 2025 (Tuesday)\nTime: 3:30-5pm\nVenue: Room 10.28\, 10/f\, Run Run Shaw Tower\, HKU\nFree seating \nSpeaker: Zhao Yi (Joey) \nZhao Yi (Joey) is a historian of medieval Chinese art and material culture. His research focuses on Chinese Buddhist art and its “horizontal” interactions with the wider Silk Routes regions as well as its “vertical” negotiations with the indigenous Chinese culture. His first book (GRF project) will examine the shifting Chinese conceptions on “afterworld paradise” along with the introduction and development of Buddhism in China between the 2nd- and 6th century. His new projects address Chan art in East Asia and Tibetan Buddhist art in late imperial China. \nHe obtained his PhD in Art History from the University of Kansas in 2023. He has taught at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Colorado College as an assistant professor and visiting assistant professor respectively. He is the recipient of Annual Graduate Research Award of 2022 from the Early Medieval China Group. His articles appear on major journals such as Archives of Asian Art\, Artibus Asiae\, Religions and etc. He is also an archaeologist who participated in the excavation of the Dayunshan Mausoleum of Prince Jiangdu (d. 128 BCE) in 2012.
URL:https://arthistory.hku.hk/index.php/event/decontextualization-reconfiguration-and-symbolization/
LOCATION:Department Seminar Room\, 1028\, Run Run Shaw Tower\, Centennial Campus\, HKU\, Hong Kong
CATEGORIES:2024-2025,Academic Talk,Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://arthistory.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/20250422-zhao-web.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="Department of Art History":MAILTO:art.history@hku.hk
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20250425T153000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20250425T170000
DTSTAMP:20260902T194810
CREATED:20250415T022856Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250415T030020Z
UID:12533-1745595000-1745600400@arthistory.hku.hk
SUMMARY:The Zoomorphic Visual Language of China’s Frontiers
DESCRIPTION:The Zoomorphic Visual Language of China’s Frontiers: A View of Transcultural Entanglements in Inner Asia from the Iron Age to the Mongol Era\nNumerous nomadic and semi-nomadic confederations flourished along the Chinese northern periphery from the middle of the first millennium BCE well into the 15th 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. \nDate: 25th April 2025 (Friday)\nTime: 3:30-5pm\nVenue: Room 10.28\, 10/f\, Run Run Shaw Tower\, HKU\nFree seating \nSpeaker: Petya Andreeva \nPetya 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.
URL:https://arthistory.hku.hk/index.php/event/the-zoomorphic-visual-language-of-chinas-frontiers/
LOCATION:Department Seminar Room\, 1028\, Run Run Shaw Tower\, Centennial Campus\, HKU\, Hong Kong
CATEGORIES:2024-2025,Academic Talk,Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://arthistory.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/20250422-andreeva-web.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="Department of Art History":MAILTO:art.history@hku.hk
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20250429T153000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Hong_Kong:20250429T170000
DTSTAMP:20260902T194810
CREATED:20250416T030434Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250416T030434Z
UID:12544-1745940600-1745946000@arthistory.hku.hk
SUMMARY:Boating through the Sacred Landscape
DESCRIPTION:Boating through the Sacred Landscape: Fang Congyi and the Spiritual Ecology of Yuan China\nAround the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries\, Daoist monks found the many secluded pockets of space\, eroded caves\, and zoomorphic peaks of the Wuyi Mountains in southeastern China conducive to their spiritual practices. They meditated\, harvested medicinal herbs\, and boated along Wuyi’s Nine Bend Stream to engage with its exceptional terrain. Notably\, the topographic painting Drifting in the Wuyi Mountains (1359) by Fang Congyi (c. 1302–1393) captures a virtual threshold\, where a scholar sails in a small boat toward a towering peak shaped like a sacred lingzhi mushroom. In contrast to previous scholarship that foregrounds the painting’s scholarly and Daoist associations\, my research applies an ecocritical perspective to examine how the work mediates embodied encounters with the physical environment. What does it mean for a painting to not only represent the natural world\, but to participate in shaping how it is experienced\, remembered\, and spiritually activated? Fang’s scroll serves as a point of departure for exploring the spiritual ecology of Wuyi—an inspirited realm where specific plants\, terrain\, and rituals supported a Daoist quest for spiritual transcendence. Ultimately\, this project advocates for close engagement with local environments and attention to nonhuman agents in order to understand how art mediates ecological relationships and contributes to a more inclusive\, materially grounded history of Chinese art and visual culture. \nDate: 29th April 2025 (Tuesday)\nTime: 3:30-5pm\nVenue: Room 10.28\, 10/f\, Run Run Shaw Tower\, HKU\nFree seating \nSpeaker: Yu-chuan Chen \nYu-chuan Chen is Assistant Professor of Art History at Oakland University and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. His research and curatorial practice center on eco-art history in East Asia\, focusing on 10th to 14th century Chinese art and visual culture. His work examines how the visual and material entanglements of humans\, natural organisms\, and sacred environments shape cultural and artistic imaginaries. His exhibitions—including A Mushroom Perspective on Sacred Geography and Earthly Hollows: Caves and Kiln Transformations—explore how spiritual agents and topographies animate spiritual and artistic expressions. His current book project\, Activating the Sacred Landscape: The Visual Culture of the Wuyi Mountains\, utilizes boat journeys as a critical lens to explore artistic visions of this sacred Daoist mountain since the twelfth century. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)\, among other institutions.
URL:https://arthistory.hku.hk/index.php/event/boating-through-the-sacred-landscape/
LOCATION:Department Seminar Room\, 1028\, Run Run Shaw Tower\, Centennial Campus\, HKU\, Hong Kong
CATEGORIES:2024-2025,Academic Talk,Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://arthistory.hku.hk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/20250429-Chen-web-01-scaled.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="Department of Art History":MAILTO:art.history@hku.hk
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR