Department of Art History

We cordially invite you to join us on Wednesday, May 27 for our last VMPEA workshop this spring. Please note the date change. The time and location will be announced soon. This workshop features:

Dongmei Liu

Visiting Scholar, Department of Art History, UChicago | Professor, Institute of Tibetan Studies, Minzu University of China

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Embodying the Canon and Cultivating Creativity: Iconometric Practice in Tibetan Thangka Master-Apprentice Transmission”

Discussant: Lucien Sun

PhD Candidate, Department of Art History, UChicago

Abstract:

This talk examines Tibetan Buddhist iconometry as a living tradition learned through the body. In studies of thangka painting, iconometry is often treated as a set of proportional rules that painters must follow. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with thangka painters in Chamdo and Lhasa, I ask how iconometry actually works in apprenticeship training, and how it shapes the body, senses, and creative capacity of painters. Through four ethnographic scenes—the first lesson on the day of apprenticeship, daily iconometric drawing assignments and review, freehand measurement sketches without grids, and the design-and-sketching process of the graduation thangka—I show how apprentices transform grids, measurements, and visual patterns into bodily ability. At the same time, I consider how textual learning, ritual practice, and teacher–apprentice relations take part in this process. Rather than treating rules and creativity as opposites, this talk argues that iconometric discipline becomes a path through which creativity is cultivated within tradition.
 

Bios:

Dongmei Liu is a Professor at the Institute of Tibetan Studies and a doctoral supervisor in anthropology of art at Minzu University of China. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Art History and the Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago. Her research focuses on Tibetan thangka painting as a living artistic tradition, especially painterly lineages, iconometry, apprenticeship, and embodied artistic transmission. Since 2008, she has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork on the Tibetan Plateau, including apprenticeship-based training with Karma Gardri and Menri thangka painters. At the University of Chicago, she is working on a project on the Chinese translation of Buddhist iconometric texts and the visual presentation of images in the Qing court. As part of this project, she is conducting research visits to U.S. museums to study Qing court thangkas through measurement and visual analysis. She is the author of Rules and Creativity: Artistic Practice of Thangka Painters in Gama, Chamdo (2012) and Aesthetic Theory and Artistic Practice of Thangka Iconometry (2022).

Lucien Sun is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. His dissertation investigates the dynamic relationship between regional space and the visual culture of southern Shanxi in north China under the Mongol rule in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. More broadly, he is interested in how local landscape was visualized, textualized, and consumed in imperial China. He also researches about arts of the book, especially on how text and image interact with particular book formats during the process of creating and reading. In that role, he has been selected as a junior fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. He was also the COSI Rhodes Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago.