Lecture:"What Happened to the First Emperor's Postmortem Spirit? Or Did He Have One? -- Rethinking the First Qin Emperor's Tomb and its Auxiliary Burial Pits"

The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities presents a lecture with Dr. Eugene Wang.

Speaker: Professor Eugene Wang (Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art, Harvard University)
Moderator: Gary Xu (East Asian Languages and Cultures)

About this Event:
Mysteries abound at the First Emperor’s (259-210 BCE) tomb. None of them is more mystifying than the curious fact that the deceased emperor appears to evince no interest in commanding his underground army. His terra-cotta soldiers face the east, while the bronze carriages, the emperor’s afterlife soul vehicle, head toward the west. Just as inexplicable is the fact that the terracotta soldiers are in life-size, while the carriages are in half-size. And what are the more recently excavated auxiliary pits at the periphery of the tomb all about—e.g. the pit with clay figures of bare upper-torsos, and the pit with stone armors without bodies? All the material evidence points to a peculiar third-century BCE conviction about the disposition of the afterlife “soul.” Did the First Emperor have a soul, and in what sense? What were the bronze soul-carriages doing there? How do those auxiliary pits serve the emperor in the afterlife world? Professor Wang’s lecture will unravel these mysteries.

About the Speaker:
A native of Jiangsu, China, Eugene Yuejin Wang studied at Fudan University in Shanghai (B.A. 1983; M.A. 1986), and subsequently at Harvard University (A.M. 1990; Ph.D. 1997). He was the Ittleson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1995-96) before joining the art history faculty at the University of Chicago in 1996. His teaching appointment at Harvard University began in 1997, and he became the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art in 2005.

He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and post-doctoral and research grants from the Getty Foundation.

His book, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005) has received the Academic Achievement Award in memory of the late Professor Nichijin Sakamoto, Rissho University, Japan. He is the art history associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (New York, 2004).

His thirty or so articles published in The Art Bulletin, Art History, Critical Inquiry, Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, Public Culture, and elsewhere, cover a wide range of subjects, including ancient bronze mirrors, Buddhist murals and sculptures, reliquaries, scroll paintings, calligraphy, woodblock prints, architecture, photography, and films. He has also translated Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux into Chinese, and wrote the screenplay for a short film, Stony Touch, selected for screening in the 9th Hawaii International Film Festival.