Art Histories
2016/ 2017

Yanlong Guo

Exotic and Domestic: The Consumption of Bronze Mirrors in Inner Asia (300 BCE–300 CE)

Bronze mirror with ibex, Xinjiang region, 5th – 3th century BCE, 11.7 cm (Height), 8.3 cm (Diameter). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number: 2002.201.66, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene V. Thaw, 2002.

Yanlong Guo received his BA and MA from Sun Yat-sen University with a major in Archaeology, and a PhD in Art History from the University of British Columbia. His primary research focuses on the art and material culture of early imperial China (3rd century BCE-3 century CE). He is currently revising his doctoral dissertation Affordable Luxury: The Entanglements of Metal Mirrors in the Han Empire (202 BCE-220 CE) into a book manuscript. It investigates the massively and luxuriously consumed mirrors in the context of a monetized economy in early imperial China. His research explores the intersections of Art History, Archaeology and Economic History. He has excavated at various sites in Guangdong, Hubei, Henan and Shanxi provinces in China. Along with specializing in early Chinese art and archaeology, he has pursued research interests in contemporary Chinese art and the visual culture of science in order to understand the interactions between the past and present, and between sciences and the visual in the East Asian context. Yanlong served as the managing editor and translator for Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Chinese version). He has published more than 100,000 words of academic translations in the field of contemporary Asian art.
 

Exotic and Domestic: The Consumption of Bronze Mirrors in Inner Asia (300 BCE - 300 CE)
 

Decades of archaeological excavations have led to the discoveries of a large number of mirrors from tombs that belonged to different ethnic groups in Inner Asia, a region roughly spanning from the Urals in the west to the Greater Khingan Range in the east, and from Lake Baikal in the north to the Great Wall in the south. These burials yielded a variety of metal mirrors-the Han mirrors, the Han-inspired mirrors, the grip mirrors-which arrived in places other than their origin through trades, raids, and tributes. As a fellow of Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices, Yanlong Guo will develop findings into an article, tentatively titled Exotic and Domestic: The Consumption of Bronze Mirrors in Inner Asia (300 BCE - 300 CE), which pushes forward a materialist perspective for approaching the early international history of consumption. It takes connected histories, rather than discrete national history, as the framework for inquiry of material circulations. Through a comprehensive examination of the consumption of the metal mirrors widely circulated in the “barbaric” lands of Inner Asia, this project provides a counter-narrative that emphasizes flows of art without attributing artistic superiority to any agents of the encounter, either the “center” or the “periphery.”