Cross-Cuts: New Approaches to Religious Blockprints in China and Beyond, 11th-17th Centuries

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel presents new approaches emphasizing the cross-cultural, cross-media, and cross-genre practices in the creation and uses of religious woodcuts from China and its neighboring cultures in northeast and Inner Asia. While building on a rich tradition of research on the art history of East Asian religious woodcuts, the four papers will consider topics not yet fully explored. Shih-Shan Susan Huang assesses the cultural exchanges demonstrated in the little-studied Buddhist woodcut illustrations produced by Inner Asian peoples (Tanguts, Uighurs, Mongols) and transmitted throughout Asia, influencing regions from Korea to the Islamic Middle East. Lucille Chia considers the information found in the front and back matter (frontispieces, imperial inscriptions, donor and printer colophon texts) of Buddhist sutras and sectarian scriptures and raises questions about how such standardized images and texts functioned in religious works. Maggie Chui Ki Wan investigates ways that the commissioners’ concerns regarding religious efficacy shaped the selection of identifiable deities in the frontispieces of Daoist scriptures, and compares this practice for Buddhist works. Ka-Yi Ho discusses the appropriation of Daoist and Buddhist figures from woodblock-printed illustrated books for secular and sacred visual products in the late imperial period, including imprints like painting manuals and daily-use encyclopedias, as well as paintings and murals in China and Korea. By examining a wide variety of religious and secular sources, the panelists will elucidate artistic and cultural interactions among Chinese and non-Chinese peoples; the political import of religious publishing; the changing efficacy of religious images; and viewers’ reception of religious woodcuts.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Kayi Ho, University of California, Los Angeles

Chair

• Shih-Shan Susan Huang, Rice University

Individual Presentations

• Religious Woodcuts and Cultural Transformation: Buddhist Woodcuts by the Tanguts, the Mongols, and the Uighurs in the Middle Period - Shih-Shan Susan Huang, Rice University

• Buddhist Sutras, Front and Back - Lucille Chia, University of California, Riverside

• “Named Figures” in Frontispieces for Daoist and Buddhist Scriptures - Chui Ki Maggie Wan, Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Transformation and Appropriation of Woodcut Illustrated Daoist and Buddhist Figures in the Late-Imperial Period - Kayi Ho, University of California, Los Angeles

Discussant

• Julia K. Murray, University of Wisconsin-Madison