Picture, Text, Trace: Relational Space in 17th Century Maps of Nanjing

The Institute for Chinese Studies at the Ohio State University presents a talk on seventeenth century Nanjing.

Catherine Stuer is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian Art History at Denison University.  She obtained her doctorate in Chinese art history under the direction of Professor Wu Hung at the University of Chicago in August 2012. Her dissertation explores how visual images of the city of Nanjing, including maps, landscape paintings, and photographs, construe this ancient capital as temporally layered place. Prior to studying in Chicago, she studied Chinese art history at the Graduate Institute of Art History of the National Taiwan University, where she obtained my master's degree with a focus on Chinese painting and a minor on Buddhist art. After studying novel experiments in the manipulation of vision in Southern Song court painting in Taiwan, while at Chicago she explored visual mediation of the otherworldly in Song dynasty representations of a Buddhist thaumaturge, historical constructions of ‘painting’ as material medium, narrative structures in pictorial travelogues, and visualizations of space and place in Chinese history.

Lecture Abstract:
The notion of the 'map' wielded here is an extended one, and involves both planimetric maps, serial landscape prints, and texts. Catherine Stuer will present some of the main ideas that form the fifth chapter of her dissertation.