Hsueh-man Shen will present at the Seminar in Comparative Medieval Material Culture on Tuesday, October 2, at 6 pm. Her talk is entitled “Art, Space, and Mobility in Maritime East Asia during the Long Twelfth Century.”

How did maritime connectivity reconfigure the cultural boundaries of medieval East Asia? This talk examines how ports and entrepôts, as areas of concentration of specific commodities and populations, formed bands whose material culture was significantly different from that of surrounding areas. Such a “banding” process took place along the East China Sea and South China Sea during the long twelfth century, resulting in places like Ningbo and Taizhou of Zhejiang (China) more closely aligned with western Kyushu (Japan) than with other parts of Zhejiang province.

Hsueh-man Shen is Associate Professor: Ehrenkranz Chair in World Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is author of the book, Authentic Replicas: Buddhist Art in Medieval China (2018), and editor of Gilded Splendor: Treasures of China’s Liao Empire (2006, German version in 2007). In 2016 she co-curated the special exhibition, Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road, for the Getty Center. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Art, Space, and Mobility in Maritime East Asia, 12th-14th Centuries.