Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China
ISBN: 9780231548731
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Columbia University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Buddhist women; Women in Buddhism; Avalokites.vara (Buddhist deity);

Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. She combines empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies.

Yuhang Li (P.h.D, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Chicago) is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the coauthor (with Judith Zeitlin) of Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture (Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 2014) and has published articles in Nannü: Men, Women, and Gender in China and Journal of East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine. She has also held postdoctoral appointments at the Department of Art History at Yale, Grinnell (Mellon Fellowship), and the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School.Yuhang Li is an assistant professor of Chinese art in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She cocurated with Judith Zeitlin the exhibition Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture and coedited the resulting catalog based on the exhibition.