Visual Culture Colloquium
Tuesday February 15, 2022 at 4:45pm
Zoom Lecture
Yuhua Ding
"Painting Antiquities in Early Twentieth-century China: The Case of Su Jiankuan"
Su Jiankuan was an early twentieth-century artist known for his paintings of antiquities that imitated the effect of composite rubbing. Great changes in the field of Chinese antiquities contributed to the popularity he enjoyed during his lifetime. The collapse of the last Imperial Dynasty transformed art patronage in China, generating an interest in the revival of collecting and researching antiquity across a wider social spectrum. The introduction of modern archaeology to China also opened new perspectives towards ancient materials, and the use of photography and collotype prints in turn gave rise to the revaluation of traditional aesthetics and connoisseurship.
Yuhua Ding is the Gregory and Maria Henderson Curatorial Fellow in East Asian Art at the Harvard Art Museums. She earned her PhD in the History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University with a research focus on East Asian art, specializing in the history and patterns of collecting in China and Chinese pictorial art from the Ming period to the mid-20th century. She was previously Curatorial Assistant of Asian Art at Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and Curatorial Researcher at Shanghai’s Liu Haisu Art Museum. Major exhibitions she organized at the Johnson Museum include Debating Art: Chinese Intellectuals at the Crossroads (2018) and Tradition, Transmission, and Transformation in East Asian Art (2016).
Image:Su JiankuanChinese, 1876-1942A Painting of Antiquities, 1926Hanging scroll: ink on paper, mounted on silkCollection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell UniversityAcquired through the Lee C. Lee Endowment for East Asian Art; 2019.036Image courtesy of the Johnson Museum
