Join us for a free one-day workshop for educators at the Japanese American National Museum, hosted by the USC U.S.-China Institute and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. This workshop will include a guided tour of the beloved exhibition Common Ground: The Heart of Community, slated to close permanently in January 2025. Following the tour, learn strategies for engaging students in the primary source artifacts, images, and documents found in JANM’s vast collection and discover classroom-ready resources to support teaching and learning about the Japanese American experience.
Power of Miniature: Virtual Pilgrimage & Virtual Cosmos in Liao Architecture (907-1125)
The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford presents a lecture with Professor Youn-mi Kim from Yale University to talk about Liao pagodas adorned with miniatures.
When:
November 3, 2014 12:00pm to 2:00pm
Where
In the eleventh century, the Liao empire’s Buddhist practitioners in northeast China created a new architectural design that adorned the exterior of a pagoda (a multi-story monument enshrining Buddhist relics) with reliefs of miniature pagodas—a rather peculiar way to embellish a building. This talk charts a journey to traverse the multilayered visual and ritual program of those Liao pagodas adorned with miniatures. Such miniatures were designed to transform a Liao pagoda into a microcosm of Buddhist sacred geography, allowing Buddhist practitioners to perform a virtual pilgrimage to the Buddha’s far away homeland. Eventually, these miniature pagodas attached to a Liao brick pagoda create a vision of a three-dimensional mise en abyme that embodies the vision of Buddhist cosmology as developed in the Chinese Huayan tradition. In this Buddhist cosmology, the cosmos is seen as infinitely layered, and each being within is interconnected and interdependent. The cosmic vision created by the interplay between the miniature replica and the original erases the boundary between the exterior and the interior spaces, and silently preaches to the viewer regarding the essence of the Buddhist teaching about non-duality and emptiness. What mattered in these Liao pagodas was not the physicality of the architectural space, but the vision of virtual space.
Youn-mi Kim, Yale University
Speaker's Bio
Professor Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. She is a specialist in Chinese Buddhist art with particular interest in symbolic rituals, in which an architectural space serves as a non-human agent; the interplay between visibility and invisibility in Buddhist art; and the sacred spaces and religious macrocosms created by religious architecture for imaginary pilgrimages. Her current book project is titled "Art, Space, and Ritual in Medieval Buddhism: From a Liao Pagoda to Heian Japanese Esoteric Ritual."
Phone Number:
650-723-2560
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Please join us for the Grad Mixer! Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, Enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow students across USC Annenberg. Graduate students from any field are welcome to join, so it is a great opportunity to meet fellow students with IR/foreign policy-related research topics and interests.
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Wednesday, November 20, 2024 - 3:00pm
Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow international students.
Thursday, November 7, 2024 - 4:00pm
Join us for an in-person conversation on Thursday, November 7th at 4pm with author David M. Lampton as he discusses his new book, Living U.S.-China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War. The book examines the history of U.S.-China relations across eight U.S. presidential administrations.