June 8-10.

This conference, hosted at The University of Hong Kong, brings together a group of international scholars who will investigate multiple perspectives on Qing dynasty pictorial art, covering a range of areas of interest and different approaches. By exposing new issues in Qing art history and drawing on related scholarship from history, literature, geography, and urban studies, the conference will forge a connective art history that recognizes the full complexity and profound historical significance of the Qing Dynasty’s drastic cultural transformations.

In recent times, a number of exhibitions and symposia have focused on aspects of Qing imperial art and connections between China and the West. Our timely conference dovetails with this burgeoning interest, but it also expands the field of research with a rich range of new or unorthodox or more interdisciplinary approaches that also include a diversity of understudied visual materials that cross disciplinary boundaries, such as woodblock prints, copperplate engraving, printed ephemera and the like, outside the Qing court.

It has been twenty years since the 1991 conference “Chinese Painting under the Qianlong Emperor” organized at the Phoenix Art Museum, to date the largest project aimed at mapping a history of Qianlong-period painting. We, the participants, feel that it is time to revisit and reassess this broader landscape of Qing image-making and raise Qing art history to a level of complexity and importance that it deserves.

This conference is generously supported by The University of Hong Kong Museum Society, the Louis Cha Fund and the School of Humanities, University of Hong Kong.