Jeffrey Moser: Making Mountains in Medieval China

Smart Lecture

Jeffrey Moser: Making Mountains in Medieval China

Lecture
CWAC 157
Add to Calendar 2025-04-03 17:00:00 2025-04-03 17:00:00 Jeffrey Moser: Making Mountains in Medieval China We invite you to join the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago for this upcoming lecture as part of the 2024-25 Smart Lecture series. The lecture is Thursday, April 3 in CWAC 157 at 5:00pm CT with a Q&A session and reception to follow.  Over the course of the long eleventh century, China witnessed the emergence of a new geological imaginary. Mountains-and-waters (shanshui) became the preeminent painting genre of the elite; sculptors, painters, and garden designers turned their attention to the “strange” (guai) shapes of eroded limestone; novel minerals were mined for inkstones; and ceramicists created glazes to emulate the visual qualities of jade and ice. Fueled by the rise of new social formations and intellectual passions, this imaginary was popularized by the expanded use of woodblock printing. It was also propelled by widespread deforestation, the exhaustion of copper mines, the colonization of China’s southern frontier, and the advent of the world’s first major fossil fuel regime. This talk explores the relative status of these broader forces in the historiography of Chinese art and considers their implications for the Anthropocene as an intellectual construct.  Jeffrey Moser is Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. A specialist in the arts of 8th to 14th-century China, his recent publications include Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China (2023) and the co-edited volume Countless Sands: Buddhists and their Environments in Medieval Asia (2024).  CWAC 157 Department of Art History drupal@seastar.uchicago.edu America/Chicago public
One Thousand Li of Rivers by Wang Ximeng Detail

We invite you to join the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago for this upcoming lecture as part of the 2024-25 Smart Lecture series. The lecture is Thursday, April 3 in CWAC 157 at 5:00pm CT with a Q&A session and reception to follow. 

Over the course of the long eleventh century, China witnessed the emergence of a new geological imaginary. Mountains-and-waters (shanshui) became the preeminent painting genre of the elite; sculptors, painters, and garden designers turned their attention to the “strange” (guai) shapes of eroded limestone; novel minerals were mined for inkstones; and ceramicists created glazes to emulate the visual qualities of jade and ice. Fueled by the rise of new social formations and intellectual passions, this imaginary was popularized by the expanded use of woodblock printing. It was also propelled by widespread deforestation, the exhaustion of copper mines, the colonization of China’s southern frontier, and the advent of the world’s first major fossil fuel regime. This talk explores the relative status of these broader forces in the historiography of Chinese art and considers their implications for the Anthropocene as an intellectual construct. 

Jeffrey Moser is Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. A specialist in the arts of 8th to 14th-century China, his recent publications include Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China (2023) and the co-edited volume Countless Sands: Buddhists and their Environments in Medieval Asia (2024).