![]() | Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000-1400 Subjects: Sarcophagi Chinese -- Themes motives; Sarcophagi -- Decoration -- China; Tombs -- Decoration -- China; Funeral rites and ceremonies Ancient -- China; Theater in art; In eleventh-century China, both the living and the dead were treated to theatrical spectacles. Chambers designed for the deceased were ornamented with actors and theaters sculpted in stone, molded in clay, rendered in paint. Notably, the tombs were not commissioned for the scholars and officials who dominate the historical record of China but affluent farmers, merchants, clerics--people whose lives and deaths largely went unrecorded. Why did these elites furnish their burial chambers with vivid representations of actors and theatrical performances? Why did they pursue such distinctive tomb-making? In Theater of the Dead, Jeehee Hong maintains that the production and placement of these tomb images shed light on complex intersections of the visual, mortuary, and everyday worlds of China at the dawn of the second millennium. Jeehee Hong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on the ritual art and visual culture of middle-period China (9th-14th centuries), and has worked on themes as diverse theatricality in painting, shifting roles of tomb portraits, cultural patterns of emerging local elite, temporality in tomb imageries, and new conceptions and practices of "spirit articles" in middle-period funerary art. Her research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, and, most recently, American Council of Learned Society. |
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