Painting, Sculpture, and Knowledge in Medieval China
This project aims for a new analysis of the History of Art from the fall of the Han Empire in the early 3rd century C.E. until the mid-8th century C.E., a time period now known as “Early Chinese Medieval”. It singles out for attention the ways medieval Chinese artists and artisans, in negotiation with Indic manners of art making, came to re-conceptualize the interrelationship between painting and sculpture. Specifically, the project discusses why and how in the five medieval centuries in China, sculpture maintained perennially a “sad countenance in the midst of painting.” Moreover, the project looks into the fundamental part that Buddhist phenomenology played in shaping medieval Chinese views on the hierarchy of the arts. Ultimately, the project places Chinese medieval approaches to the paragone in a larger perspective in a transregionally open world Art History.