Art Histories
2014/ 2015

Yudong Wang

Painting, Sculpture, and Knowledge in Medieval China

Seated Bodhisattva, painted clay, Mogao Cave 275, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, early 5th century
Seated Bodhisattva, painted clay, Mogao Cave 275, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, early 5th century.

Yudong Wang studied Art History and Archaeology at Beijing University, Indiana University, and the University of Chicago. He was a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 2013 and has taught at University of Puget Sound (Tacoma, Washington) and Union College (Schenectady, New York). Currently he is professor in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in Guangzhou, China. His research interests focus on the history of medieval Chinese art, primarily Buddhist art, funerary art, and painting theory.
 

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.