Center for East Asian Studies Speaker Series | Ornamental, Practical, or Cosmological? Scopic Regimes of Botany in Chinese Painting of the Ming Dynasty

Center for East Asian Studies Speaker Series

Kathleen Ryor (Tanaka Memorial Professor of International Understanding and Art History,Carleton College)

“Ornamental, Practical, or Cosmological?
Scopic Regimes of Botany in Chinese Painting of the Ming Dynasty”

Date: Oct.18, 2021
Time: 4:00 to 5:30 pm
Place: Elvehjem Building L140
Abstract  
By the sixteenth century in China, there was a vast corpus of published texts on plants, which ranged from horticultural treatises of single species to manuals of elegant living, and from pharmacopeia to encyclopedias that compiled knowledge of all aspects of the natural world.  Some of these printed texts had illustrations, but they existed within a larger economy of knowledge that included one of the three major genres of painting, “bird-and-flower” painting, which can more accurately be characterized as the depiction of flora and fauna. This talk will examine the ways in which handscroll paintings of flowers and plants during the latter half of the Ming dynasty reflect the ways in which the cultivation of garden plants served as a mode of producing botanical knowledge, as well as a means to understanding the cosmos.

Co-sponsors of this talk:
The Center for East Asian Studies
The Department of Art History
The Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
The Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies