Lianming Wang - Fountains, Jesuit Hydrology, and the Making of Qing Political Landscape
Thursday, May 26, 5pm
CWAC 157
Simultaneous live stream available
This lecture attempts to capture the major moments of the Sino-European hydraulic encounters by examining how Jesuit hydrology reinvigorated the ancient Chinese idea on water and stimulated the making of Qing political landscape. Particular attention will be paid to the valence of fountains and plays of water in eighteenth-century Qing visual and material culture; with the help of Jesuit court artists, the designs of European theatrical fountains were incorporated into the cosmological imagery of court-made clocks and became urban spectacles and focal points of imperial celebrations. This lecture will further demonstrate that the cosmological and religious visions (both Taoist and Buddhist) embedded in early Chinese water devices penetrated the ways in which Qianlong Emperor conceived his decades-long project of the “Water Palaces” (Shuifadian). It will also be argued that the encounters with Jesuit hydrology provided the major technical and cultural impetus to achieve and transform the “Water Palaces” into a Qing political landscape, which went far beyond the desire of a “Chinese Occidenterie.”
WANG Lianming is currently a Visiting Professor at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and will be joining the King’s College of the University of Cambridge as the Global Humanities Visiting Professor this fall. Previously, Wang has taught at the University of Würzburg (2009-11) and Heidelberg University (2014-21). From 2018 to 2019, Wang held an Art Histories Fellow in the research group “Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices” at the Berlin-based Forum Transregional Studies (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz). His areas of research include global encounters of arts and culture in early modernity and the artistic practices and materiality associated with trans-territorial animals. Wang has organized workshops and conferences related to Sino-European exchanges, including The Jesuit Legacies: Images, Visuality, and Cosmopolitanism in Qing China (chief organizer, 2015), Reframing Chinese Objects: Practices of Collecting and Displaying in Europe and the Islamic World, 1400-1800 (co-organizer, 2018), and Before the Silk Road: Eurasian Interactions in the First Millennium BC (chief-organizer, 2019). Wang is the recipient of the Klaus Georg and Sigrid Hengstberger Prize (2018) and the Academy Prize (2021) of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
This convening is open to all invitees who are compliant with UChicago vaccination requirements and, because of ongoing health risks, particularly to the unvaccinated, participants are expected to adopt the risk mitigation measures (masking and social distancing, etc.) appropriate to their vaccination status as advised by public health officials or to their individual vulnerabilities as advised by a medical professional. Public convening may not be safe for all and carries a risk for contracting COVID-19, particularly for those unvaccinated. Participants will not know the vaccination status of others and should follow appropriate risk mitigation measures.
This lecture is presented by the Department of Art History as part of the 2021/22 Smart Lecture series supported by the Smart Family Foundation.