Beyond the Literati: Opening up Our Vision to the Rest of Chinese Painting

The Society for Asian Art presents a lecture with James Cahill on the importance of non-literati classes and women in Chinese art.

Our studies of Chinese painting have been dominated – in the view of James Cahill – by the doctrines of the Chinese literati, a male elite minority who ran much of the government and wrote most of the published literature. Now in later life Dr. Cahill has switched his position to include and give importance to the non-literati classes, as well as women, including the vernacular paintings that are the subject of his recent book. This lecture will focus on both these subjects and draw on his own long engagement with the Asian Art Museum and its docent program.

Dr. Cahill, a native Californian and a longtime Berkeley person, is well known to our audiences because of his lengthy association with the AAM and the Docent program. He has studied Chinese paintings under the great teachers Max Loehr, Shujiro Shimada and C.C. Wang. His latest project is the making of video lectures on Chinese and Japanese paintings, accessible for free viewing on his website.

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