Jun Hu | University of California, Berkeley (original) (raw)

Dissertation by Jun Hu

Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 2014

This dissertation reconceptualizes the notion of built environment against the religious culture ... more This dissertation reconceptualizes the notion of built environment against the religious culture of East Asia in the early medieval period. Through a study of domical building forms in brick, cave and timber, the author argues, as interior devices domical forms are central to the architectural tradition of East Asia in the creation of sacral spaces.

At the heart of this dissertation are three significant case studies which transcend religious and national boundaries. Starting with Buddhist cave temples preserved at Dunhuang in northwestern China, the author probes into the beginning and early permutations of a particular cave type (fifth through the late sixth centuries), which, despite its square plan, evinces artistic endeavors, plastic and painterly, to inscribe a domed circular space within the square. The next case study takes place in eighth-century Nara, then the newly established capital of Japan, where the earliest timber "circular" buildings on record are found, with the qualification that they are, in fact, octagonal in plan and yet are almost unanimously considered circular in contemporaneous documents. Finally, larger issues pertaining to technology, ideology, and the domical form are explored in the contexts of mortuary and ritual buildings in China. On the one hand, the author charts technological advancement in brick construction which laid the ground for the emergence of a complete cosmos in Chinese tombs at the dawn of the Common Era. In the meantime, however, discussions of the series of failed attempts to construct the domical ritual structure of the Bright Hall from this period onwards reveal a case of how excessive expectations on the dome's capacity to signify undermined its own realization in material form.

These three case studies, viewed jointly, also afford a picture of the material culture of religious practice in East Asia in this period. Architectural forms are shown to be no mere physical spaces in which religious images are placed. Rather, as representations and enclosures, they enjoyed a meaning and status equivalent to their pictorial or sculptural counterparts.

Dissertation Committee: Jerome Silbergeld (Primary Advisor), Andrew Watsky, Stephen F. Teiser, Cary Y. Liu.

Articles by Jun Hu

A World within Worlds: A Special Issue of The Medieval Globe, 2017

This article focuses on the Shōsō-in repository in Nara, a collection of artifacts that were fash... more This article focuses on the Shōsō-in repository in Nara, a collection of artifacts that were fashioned in various media along the Silk Road. The repository first took shape in the mid-eighth century, when the personal collection of Emperor Shōmu (r. 724–749) was posthumously dedicated to the Buddha Vairocana. While the precocious globalism of this collection has been celebrated in previous literature, I examine some of the local and intercontinental mechanisms that brought these artifacts to Japan. Through a close reading of the original dedication in 756, I argue that this global collection of art, along with the religion of Buddhism, sustained the belief in an interconnected world, and allowed Shōmu and his associates to imagine themselves projected well beyond the boundaries of their country.

Book Reviews by Jun Hu

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2018

Talks by Jun Hu

Panel, "Faithful Copies: On Replication and Creative Agency in Buddhist Art," Annual Conference of the College Art Association, Los Angeles, February, 2018

This paper examines a curious architectural typology-a small commemorative timber structure erect... more This paper examines a curious architectural typology-a small commemorative timber structure erected on an octagonal plan-with a view to explore its early beginning in Japan in the eighth century and its afterlife through a number of replications after the ninth century. Buildings of this type, three of which still survive from Nara, do not fit neatly into conventional classes of Buddhist architecture in East Asia. Through a close study of period records and the religious icons that originally occupied these octagonal halls, I argue these hitherto understudied structures were instrumental, at two different stages, in shaping and calibrating local memories of Japan's place in the broad Buddhist world. In the eighth century these buildings were initially constructed to commemorate local patrons of Buddhism. By virtue of the perceived connection between the building typology and bodhisattvahood, this notion of sainthood became localized in Japan through architectural intervention. Towards the late tenth century as political circumstances and soteriological schemes began to shift, however, the octagonal building type was appropriated by members of the Fujiwara family as a palladium. A number of copies of the early ninth-century Nan'endō were made on the precincts of their family temples. Therefore, what was once an architectural strategy to appeal to the broader Buddhist community now became a palimpsest, as meanings of family prestige, pedigree, and religious patronage were added to it.

East Asian Garden Lecture Series, The Huntington Library, April, 2017

This lecture looks at some of the oldest timber structures that survive in Japan. This group of s... more This lecture looks at some of the oldest timber structures that survive in Japan. This group of small buildings is curiously described in period sources as "octagonal-circular halls." They were built in Nara in the eighth century to commemorate important patrons of Buddhism. And as memorial structures they continued to be a prominent feature in Japanese Buddhist architecture. We shall try to understand not only the meanings and functions of this peculiar architectural typology in eighth-century Japan, but also its past and future through other visual sources in East Asia.

Conference, Word and Image: Chinese Woodblock Prints, The Huntington Library, November, 2016

This paper examines the meeting between woodblock print and ink painting. Rather than trying to s... more This paper examines the meeting between woodblock print and ink painting. Rather than trying to situate both against a vibrant visual culture and to probe the social repercussions of image consumption in the late Ming-scholarship over the past two decades has greatly advanced our knowledge on this subject-I intend to look more closely at what happens to painting and painting criticism in this great age of woodblock printing, and how each also becomes the other's metaphor.

The two prefaces in Gu Bing's 顧炳1604 woodblock album Master Gu's History of Painting (顧氏畫譜) make a concerted effort to assert the status of the printed images as paintings. They draw from a canonizing language whose authority derives from various modules of replication-steles, bronze casting, and the printing and dissemination of Confucian classics-to bear on these images that have been allegedly copied from paintings in the imperial collection. The history of painting is framed in these two prefaces as a history of ji 跡 (traces/vestiges), as a form of relay whose transmission can now be warranted by the mechanical means of the woodblock print.

If the language of these two prefaces steers dangerously close to the rhetoric of painting criticism since the late fifth century, it does not go unnoticed among the painters' circles. The colophons to the printed painting manual Huilin 繪林(Forests of Painting) by Zhou Lüjing 周履靖 (1542-1633), written by scholar officials and cultural critics like Shen Shixing 申時行 (1535-1614), Shen Mouxiao 沈懋孝 (1537-1612), and Wang Zhideng王樨登 (1535-1612), exhibit an interesting combination of measured enthusiasm and (sometimes forthright) reservation. To Dong Qichang 董其昌 (1555-1636), who incidentally is also one of the contributors to these colophons, the metaphor of the print cuts even deeper in his thinking. The notion of kehua 刻畫 ("carved delineation") figures prominently in his writings. The meaning of the term within his corpus varies greatly: on different occasions, it is used to refer to meticulous delineation that enslave an artist to his subject, or to too-close modeling on past exemplars, while elsewhere in more positive terms to his own practice of repetitive copying of calligraphic models.

The power and urgency of the metaphor and its reference to carving is specific to Dong's own time. Taken together, the shades of meaning which kehua invokes and the fractures among them betray his anxiety about the carved media into which paintings of the past are increasingly translated and popularly transmitted in the late Ming period, just like such projects as Master Gu's History of Painting and Forests of Painting purport to do. But Dong's metaphor of the "carved"-"painting" is also the dilemma for every literati painter writ large. For a painting tradition within which issues of style, originality, and genealogy are always intertwined with practice of replication-and the difference between the model and one's own deviation from it cannot be easily articulated-the proliferation of printed "paintings" drags the mysterious business of the literati tradition into the open.

Panel, "Delineations: Linearity and Its Alternatives in Chinese Painting, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century," Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, Seattle, April, 2016

The relationship between bodily condition and aesthetic style is a recurring topos in Chinese pai... more The relationship between bodily condition and aesthetic style is a recurring topos in Chinese painting theory and criticism. The late Ming artist Dong Qichang 董其昌 (1555- 1636), ever so alert to this relationship and later in his life highly conscious of his own longevity (“nourished by mists and clouds”), postulated a correlation between old age and style. Famously, he attributed the short lifespans of Qiu Ying 仇英 (1494/5-1552) and Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 (1254-1322) to the detailed (xijin 細謹) manners of their paintings. The last two dated paintings from Dong’s hand should therefore lead one to wonder whether he heeded his own advice: both handscrolls, one, dated 1635, a miniature of a mere 13 centimeters in height, and the other, a landscape in a “detailed and complex (細瑣)” manner done two months prior to his death. This paper revisits the notions of lateness and timeliness in Chinese painting through a case study of these last two paintings of Dong Qichang in terms of their formats, purposes, and stylistic references. I suggest that for Dong, whose evolution as a painter displays an unusual facility for absorbing and in time rising above stylistic influences, painting became an increasingly self-reflexive practice towards the end of his life. These two handscrolls, more than anything, should be understood as a commentary on his own style.

Lecture, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University, February, 2016

Every year in late fall hundreds of thousands in Japan flock to the ancient city of Nara. For a b... more Every year in late fall hundreds of thousands in Japan flock to the ancient city of Nara. For a brief window of two weeks, these modern pilgrims are treated to an exhibition of select items from a repository known as the Shōsō-in. This repository, first assembled in the mid-eighth century, encompasses artifacts that were created, traded, and in some cases, made to order, along the Silk Road. Since the late nineteenth century, the Shōsō-in has been called variously a “repository of Central Asian art,” a “museum of antiquities,” and more recently, the “final destination” of the Silk Road. Perhaps less known is the fact that this precocious collection of global art first came into place owing to concerns that were ultimately local, religious, and maritorious: it all began with Empress Kōmyō’s donation of the prized possessions of the then recently deceased Emperor Shōmu to the Buddhist monastery of Tōdai-ji in 756, for the deliverance of the emperor and his subjects. This lecture will address the question of how the haphazard globalism of this collection was domesticated to serve needs particular to the Japanese imperium and the Buddhist ecclesia in the eighth century; it will also introduce global and local contingencies that continue to shape our understanding of the Shōsō-in in the modern period.

Conference "Visualizing Dunhuang," Princeton University , 2015

Before full-fledged depictions of Pure Lands on cave walls began to emerge in the Tang period (61... more Before full-fledged depictions of Pure Lands on cave walls began to emerge in the Tang period (618–906), the cave ceilings at Dunhuang are where some of the most lavish artistic efforts were invested, and where dynamic changes in pictorial design occurred. This paper examines one brief albeit critical episode in the history of ceiling design at Dunhuang. Toward the end of the 6th century, that is, between the Northern Zhou (557–581) and the Sui (581–618) periods, cave ceilings began to be occupied by lavishly painted narratives. These narrative paintings often take the form of scrolls that cover multiple registers as if these episodic vignettes have radiated from the center of the ceiling. The visual and religious interest of these spectacles is sometimes further underscored by lavish gilding of the Buddha figures. In this paper I shall explore the principles behind the organization of these compelling visual narratives, the possible models they were derived from, and, most importantly, their architectural significance—how such ceiling designs inform us of the meanings of cave interiors at Dunhuang.

Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia Workshop, University of Chicago, October 2015

Landscape painting in China is often conditioned by a sense of self-reference. Artists study ea... more Landscape painting in China is often conditioned by a sense of self-reference. Artists study earlier styles not only as motifs and pictorial content, but also as means. Centuries of conscious emulation and oblique reference makes it possible for a trained eye to see “Wang Wei” in a “Zhao Mengfu,” and “Zhao Mengfu,” in a “Dong Qichang.” But it is only in the seventeenth century, it would seem, that a panoptic vision of the past begins to take form: in this vision “styles” become legible patterns that can be mapped onto history, and it is possible now to (rather like in a modern day art history book) pin a name to a picture. In painted and printed pictorial albums, past styles become the primary subject matter. This talk will explore the formats, mediums, and other conditions in which this “carnival” of pictorial styles took place in seventeenth-century China, as well as its discontents.

Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, March 2015, Panel: Perspectives on Medium and Message in Chinese Art

This paper subjects the notion of kehua 刻畫 ("carved delineation") in Dong Qichang's 董其昌 (1555-163... more This paper subjects the notion of kehua 刻畫 ("carved delineation") in Dong Qichang's 董其昌 (1555-1636) influential historical writing to a close reading in the context of its time. The meaning of the term within Dong's corpus varies greatly: on different occasions, it referred to meticulous delineation that enslaved an artist to his subject, or to too-close modeling on past exemplars, while elsewhere in more positive terms to his own practice of repetitive copying. I argue that the power and urgency of the metaphor and its reference to carving was specific to Dong's own time. Taken together, the meanings of kehua and the fractures among them betray Dong's anxiety about the carved media into which paintings of the past were increasingly translated and popularly transmitted in the late Ming period. Through prints, rubbings, and hand copies, the works of ancient masters acquired new but distorted lives, ghosts that haunted Dong and those who understood, resented, and resisted their historical distortion. The notion of kehua, now usually understood simply as "stiff" but here referenced to the source of that stiffness, reveals the focus of Dong Qichang's critique in this transformative period with its explosion of book publication, art manuals, and rapid expansion of painting practice. Dong's Southern School theory was formulated against the grain of his time, his rhetorical conceit of "sudden enlightenment" designed to reference precisely this popularization of painting by shifts in media, mediation, and increasing ease of replication.