Seminar: Taking Care of Buddhist Material Culture
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
10:00 am to 1:00 pm
- Venue
- Main Building
- Room
- RG01
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
In this seminar, we will explore approaches to the premodern care and treatment of Buddhist material culture from Dunhuang through selected case studies.
Studies on medieval Europe have elucidated the ways in which the touching of statues, relics, and manuscripts was integral to their reverence and use. Recent scholarship on premodern Japanese Buddhist art has advanced our understanding of when and how Buddhist artifacts were deemed worthy of repair or reuse. How can we bring these comparative approaches to bear on Dunhuang material culture, and how might they help us to bridge the gap between art history and manuscript studies, and between museums and archives?
Following a brief introduction, participants in the seminar will examine these issues and consider historiography and methodology through a discussion of selected primary and secondary sources.
Attending the event
This event is free and open to all, but registration is required.
Sponsor and organiser
The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Lecture Series in Chinese Buddhism is kindly sponsored by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. It has been organised by the SOAS Centre of Buddhist Studies.
About the speaker
Michelle C. Wang is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Georgetown University. Her research addresses the medieval Buddhist and silk road art of northwestern China, and the history of colonial era silk road archaeology.
Her first monograph, Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (Brill, 2018), examines mandalas of the 8th-10th centuries at Buddhist cave shrines in Dunhuang. She recently co-edited Beyond the Silk and Book Roads: Rethinking Networks of Exchange and Material Culture (Brill, 2024). Her current book project examines the expeditions of Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) and their intersections with British colonial institutions and discourses on craft, ethnography, and climate change.
