Jason Sun will deliver The Iris Foundation Awards Lecture on Tuesday, April 17, at 5:30 pm. His talk is entitled “The First Emperor, the Chinese Empire, and the Wider World: Art and Material Culture of the Qin Dynasty.”

By examining the art and material culture recovered through archaeology in the last fifty years, this presentation focuses on the First Emperor of China and the Empire that he created during the late third century BC. It also explores the contact between China and other parts of the world, which resulted from the increased trade and exchange over the transcontinental Silk Road and through maritime routes across the oceans.

Jason Sun is the Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art in the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He received his PhD in Chinese Art and Archaeology from Princeton University and was the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Curator of East Asian Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art before joining the Metropolitan in 1999. Dr. Sun has curated The Bishop Jades, Excellence and Elegance: Decorative Art of the Eighteenth Century Qing Court, Small Delight: Chinese Snuff Bottles, Colors of the Universe: Chinese Hardstone Carvings, and the 2017 landmark exhibition Age of Empires: Chinese Art of the Qin and Dynasties (221 BC– AD 220). He worked with James Watt, former chairman of the Asian Art Department, on two seminal exhibitions: China: Dawn of a Golden Age, and The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty. Dr. Sun has lectured and published widely on a variety of subjects, including Chinese jade carving, metalwork, calligraphy, archaeology, and museum studies.