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What's Going On at MEMS?

Dear Friends,

MEMS continues to sponsor the Premodern Colloquium (meets Sunday afternoons once a month) as well as occasional MEMS Lectures.

We hope you will join us, and watch the website calendar of events for upcoming lectures and other activities of interest!

The Premodern Colloquium. Why Did Public Infrastructure Appear in Song Court Landscape Painting?

Gerui Wang, U-M History of Art
Friday, April 23, 2021
3:00-5:00 PM
Virtual
This essay examines the public infrastructure depicted in Northern Song (960-1127) court landscape paintings, which includes roads, waterways, bridges, and river ports. These paintings not only depict the public works but also portray people from all social strata utilizing these public resources. This new development in the landscape genre coincided with the political and social thought of the period, which held that the state should spend tax revenues collected from the population to improve the wellbeing of the people.

The reading investigates visual materials ranging from court landscape painting, administrative maps in local gazetteers, as well as steles. The legal basis for the emergence of such landscape paintings in the 11th century was the separation of the emperor’s private treasury from the public treasury of the state. That separation was a factor in numerous policy debates from the period and was systematically documented in an early thirteenth-century book.
Building: Off Campus Location
Location: Virtual
Event Type: Workshop / Seminar
Tags: Art History, China, history, Research, Visual Arts
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)