True Form Charts and the Daoist Visuality

Susan Huang will speak on Daoist visuality at the University of Chicago.

Shih-shan Susan Huang’s current research focuses on the 10th-to-14th-century Daoist and Buddhist visual culture in China.  Prior to joining the Rice faculty, she taught at the University of Washington, Seattle, and was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Columbia University. Her dissertation, “The Triptych of Taoist Deities of Heaven, Earth, and Water and the Making of Visual Culture in the Southern Song China (1127-1279),” has been awarded the Blanshard Prize at Yale University. Her recent publications appeared in Artibus Asiae, Orientations, Ars Orientalis, and the Journal of Daoist Studies. Her book-length project has been granted the 2008-09 Junior Scholar Award by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (CCK).

Huang’s first book, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China, will be published by the Harvard University Asia Center Publication (distributed by Harvard University Press). It investigates a long-neglected topic: the visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, and asks questions regarding the visuality, meaning, and function of Daoist images. Being the first of its kind to appear in any language, this book intends to present a comprehensive mapping and study of Daoist images found in various media—paintings, diagrams, drawings, and woodblock prints scattered in various sources, especially those preserved in the Daoist Canon compiled in the 15th century. The book is divided into two parts: the inner and the outer chapters. Individual chapters feature such topics as body and cosmos, the True Form Charts, materiality and performance of Daoist ritual, and Daoist liturgical painting.

Huang’s next book-length project deals with the early Buddhist print culture during the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. She is interested in expanding the study to the cross-cultural context, drawing comparative examples from the visual materials of the Tangut Xi Xia, the Khitan Liao, the Jurchen Jin, and the Goreyo Korea. A preliminary study will appear in the forthcoming edited volume on Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print: China, 900-1400 (Brill, 2011). She will present further study on the related topic in the forthcoming international workshop on the transformation of the cultural history of images organized by the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei.