Cave Temples of Sichuan in Eco Art History

Cave Temples of Sichuan in Eco Art History

Date: 16 November 2011 (Wednesday)
Time: 5:00pm
Venue: Room 2.38, Main Building, HKU

Cave temples are a unique architectural form that transforms a mountain into a place for religious activities through the installment of pictorial images and other artifacts. Their widespread popularity across Asia and remarkable longevity make them a particularly suitable subject to explore the complex relationship between human society, art and the environment. This presentation introduces an ecological history of cave temples that aims to explain how and why these structures had changed the way the natural surrounding was understood by the local community, and conversely, how this altered landscape reshaped the values and worldview of its human inhabitants. A focus on sites in the southwestern province of Sichuan highlights a region rich in its engagement with the environment throughout the ages, as evident in the local artistic practices, land use, social institutions, politics, religious beliefs, and technological development. It also calls attention to a distinctive tradition of design that had relied on the use of monumental sculpture on the exterior to define the visual interests of a particular site. Central to this narrative was the emergence of colossal Buddhas in the eighth century, as exemplified by the century-long construction of the seated Maitreya at Leshan.

Speaker: Sonya S. Lee

Sonya Lee is Associate Professor of Chinese Art and Visual Culture at University of Southern California in Los Angeles, U.S.A. She is the author of Surviving Nirvana: Death of the Buddha in Chinese Visual Culture (Hong Kong University Press, 2010). Currently, she is the Paul Mellon Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C..