Sanctified commodities : the Buddhist paintings of Wu Bin (c. 1540-1626) and the late Ming Buddhist revival
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- My dissertation intervenes in the current approaches to China's late Ming (c. 1572--1644) Buddhist revival by analyzing the paintings of the elite gentleman and devout lay Buddhist, Wu Bin (c. 1540--1626). As a lower-elite individual who maintained the aura of painting for leisure yet made his living with his brush, Wu Bin's life and works offer a new perspective on the late Ming Buddhist revival, outside of the current focus on official examination elites, famous monks, and the imperial family. In tracing the sociocultural environments, artistic choices, and reception of Wu Bin's Buddhist paintings, I first identify the Buddhist network of support that developed around significant temples in China, revealing an undiscovered motivation for the sixteenth-century rise in figure painting. I analyze Wu Bin's responses to this alternate form of support, investigating his donation of a set of 500 Luohans paintings to Nanjing's Qixia Temple and his self-fashioning of a deeply devout Buddhist persona. Then, turning to his key works, my research uncovers Wu Bin's engagement with broader late Ming discourse around the problematic nature of Buddhist visual representation. Wu Bin's paintings expose his responses to contemporaneous debates surrounding the incursion of images into traditionally textual spaces and the potential pitfalls of colorful images enticing the viewer away from a deeper understanding of Buddhist philosophy. Within the context of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century publishing boom, which helped create an audience steeped in Buddhist visual and doctrinal material, Wu Bin formulated engaging, efficacious images that embodied religious concepts as well as economic concerns. By realigning Wu Bin, an artist currently associated predominantly with landscape painting, into the contemporaneous understanding of him as primarily a Buddhist painter, my dissertation brings religious and art-historical methodological frameworks into dialogue, establishing a previously overlooked source for reconstructing the complex role of Buddhist painting and lived religion across wide cultural and social strata in early modern China.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Pawlowski, Anna Catherine |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Vinograd, Richard Ellis |
| Thesis advisor | Vinograd, Richard Ellis |
| Thesis advisor | Harrison, Paul M. (Paul Maxwell), 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Kieschnick, John, 1964- |
| Thesis advisor | Kwon, Marci |
| Degree committee member | Harrison, Paul M. (Paul Maxwell), 1950- |
| Degree committee member | Kieschnick, John, 1964- |
| Degree committee member | Kwon, Marci |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Anna Pawlowski. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Anna Catherine Pawlowski
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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