Event

Scholarship on the bird-and-flower genre of Chinese painting has almost exclusively focused on their function as visual rebuses that convey auspicious messages or has explored the ways that the scholar-elite used imagery of flora and fauna for expressive purposes.  In the case of paintings of flora, both of these interpretative paths have also focused on well-known plants that are multivalent and have a long history of symbolic use in poetry and other forms of literature.  This lecture will examine a group of anonymous paintings that date to the Ming dynasty but have spurious signatures of various famous specialists in the genre from the 10th-13the centuries.  These paintings depict plants that are rarely celebrated in literature but have important uses as medicine, food and dyes.  In this talk, I will suggest that detailed images of nature had a large audience during the Ming period and that the market for such paintings is tied to literati interests in botany and medicine, as well as notions of the garden as a space to harmonize with the cosmos.

*Lunch will be provided.