Jennifer Purtle（裴珍妮）
My research focuses principally on Chinese painting and visual culture. My methodological interests are, on the one hand, in artistic geographies and artistic mobility - that, how, and why artists and objects move, and what happens when they do - and on the other in methodological approaches to Chinese art history that permit the history of objects in China to be seen on their own terms, outside the epistemological confines of the discipline of art history that are tacitly and insidiously "Western." Beginning in the 1990s, much of my work has been grounded in archival and field work China's Fujian province. In a major, revisionist book, Peripheral Vision: Fujian Paintings in Chinese Empires, 909-1646, I explore the production of paintings in, and by natives of Fujian, as well as their circulation in a succession of Chinese empires. I am currently midway through a new project, "Forms of Cosmopolitanism in the Sino-Mongol City," which connects Fujian and other places in China to many other parts of the medieval world. My interests are not limited to Fujian, but Fujian has proven to be a fruitful site for new inquiry into the history of Chinese art.
Recently I completed serving as Principal Investigator of the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories Project "Global and Postglobal Perspectives on Medieval Art and Art History;" I have also been the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (USA) and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute among other major awards. My publications include: Reading Revolution: Art and Literacy during China's Cultural Revolution (Coach House Books, 2016) and Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture from the Treaty Ports to World War II (University of Chicago Press, 2009). My articles and essays have appeared in Art History, Journal of Asian Studies, Medieval Encounters, Orientations, and other journals, as well as in volumes edited by James Elkins, Thomas daCosta Kaufmann, Jerome Silbergeld, Eugene Wang, Wu Hung, and others. I have presented papers at four CIHA congresses (2000, London; 2004, Montreal; 2008, Melbourne; 2016 Beijing) among other venues.
Prospective PhD students should have formal training in Chinese art history or a related field, reading knowledge of modern Chinse and prior training in Classical Chinese, and ideally propose a topic in one of the two areas in which I am currently working: history of Chinese painting or China in the Global Middle Ages. MA applicants may come from any background and be interested in any subfield of Chinese art -- curiosity and a willingness to learn are the most important requirements at that level.
Recently I completed serving as Principal Investigator of the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories Project "Global and Postglobal Perspectives on Medieval Art and Art History;" I have also been the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (USA) and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute among other major awards. My publications include: Reading Revolution: Art and Literacy during China's Cultural Revolution (Coach House Books, 2016) and Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture from the Treaty Ports to World War II (University of Chicago Press, 2009). My articles and essays have appeared in Art History, Journal of Asian Studies, Medieval Encounters, Orientations, and other journals, as well as in volumes edited by James Elkins, Thomas daCosta Kaufmann, Jerome Silbergeld, Eugene Wang, Wu Hung, and others. I have presented papers at four CIHA congresses (2000, London; 2004, Montreal; 2008, Melbourne; 2016 Beijing) among other venues.
Prospective PhD students should have formal training in Chinese art history or a related field, reading knowledge of modern Chinse and prior training in Classical Chinese, and ideally propose a topic in one of the two areas in which I am currently working: history of Chinese painting or China in the Global Middle Ages. MA applicants may come from any background and be interested in any subfield of Chinese art -- curiosity and a willingness to learn are the most important requirements at that level.
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Papers by Jennifer Purtle（裴珍妮）
In hopes better to understand disparate practices of systematic visual communication in the variably defined "Global Middle Ages," both before and yet inextricably linked to the dawn of the World System, 1250-1350, this essay examines programs of religious narrative relief sculpture from two linked sites within the maritime networks that connected Europe, the Islamic world, and East Asia. One cycle, that of the bronze doors for the west portal of the cathedral of Santa Maria Nuova at Monreale made by Bonanus of Pisa (fl. ca. 1179–86) in 1186 and exemplified by an image of the Nativity, inscribed nativitas d(omi)ni (lit., the birth of the Lord), the text of which was accidentally cast in mirror-image reversal, represents the iconographic prac- tices of Norman Sicily. Notably, a Chinese geography of circa 1225 recorded Sicily, the westernmost point known in Chinese maritime networks that extended from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. The other cycle, that of stone-carved reliefs for the base of the Zhenguo Pagoda 鎮國塔, or east pagoda, of the Kaiyuan si Buddhist temple in Quanzhou made under the supervision of the Buddhist monk Benhong 本洪 (fl. early–mid thirteenth century) circa 1238 and exemplified by an image of the Birth of the Buddha, inscribed 毗藍誕瑞 (Pilan danrui, lit., the auspicious birth in [the] Lumbini [garden]), is taken as typical of the iconographic practices of Southern Song China, the port city of Quanzhou, the easternmost point named in an Arab-Norman-Byzantine world geography of 1154. At these two linked sites, Monreale and Quanzhou, narrative reliefs fashioned from durable materials communicated text-based content to audiences of variable literacy able to parse their three-dimensional representational codes and/or their laconic texts, including those that portrayed the human form of divine beings, as noted above.
Appendices that analyze the textual program of Bonanus' bronze doors at Monreale and the reliefs of the Zhenguo pagoda at the Kaiyuan temple, Quanzhou.
The art of the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368) is that produced in China under Mongolian rule. Traditional Chinese histories of the arts of this period, as well as many 20th-century accounts, have emphasized developments in Chinese-style arts. Since the late 20th century, scholarship in Europe, North America, and Asia has begun to address the vibrant multiculturalism of the arts in the Chinese portion of the Great Mongol Nation (Mongolian: Yeke Mongɣol Ulus, likely a translation of the Chinese Dai Menggu guo), bounded in the west by the eastern reaches of Hungary; in the east, by the Pacific Ocean; in the north, by the steppes; and in the south, by India and northern Vietnam. Just as the Yuan state was multilingual, so too its art assimilated the forms of multiple cultures that existed within the larger Mongolian Empire. Mongolian studies flourished from the 1950s to the 1980s in Europe and North America. This scholarship, on political and cultural histories of the Great Mongol Nation, grounded in both Mongolian and Chinese primary sources, sparked contemporary art-historical scholarship on the Yuan dynasty. Unlike the work of historians, which took a broad linguistic view of the period, even the most groundbreaking scholarship on Yuan dynasty art of that period was rooted in classical Chinese-language primary sources. Lack of engagement with primary sources in Mongolian, Persian, and Tibetan, coupled with the inaccessibility of China and Mongolia to scholars from other countries, especially in the West, produced scholarship on Yuan dynasty art that emphasized Chinese artistic media and forms. For much of the 20th century, the predominant subfield of Chinese art history was the history of painting. However, the arts of the Yuan dynasty include other important media, namely, architecture, urbanism, and the decorative arts, especially ceramics and textiles. The Yuan dynasty was the age in which blue-and-white porcelain was born and became a significant trade good. This was also a period in which traditional Chinese techniques of textile manufacture were transformed by contact with imported weaves and fibers. Additionally, given that the Yuan dynasty circulated artists and artisans from throughout Mongol-held lands, the arts of the Yuan also saw the development of sculpture, painting in non-Chinese styles, and metalwork.
Last Modified: 30 January 2014
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Review Essays and Book Reviews by Jennifer Purtle（裴珍妮）