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Bard Graduate Center is an advanced graduate research institute in New York City dedicated to the cultural histories of the material world. Our MA and PhD degree programs, Gallery exhibitions, research initiatives, scholarly publications and public programs explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.

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Research

Bard Graduate Center is a research institute for advanced, interdisciplinary study of diverse material worlds. We support the innovative scholarship of our faculty and students as well as resident fellows, guest curators and artists, and visiting speakers.

Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

Our Public Humanities + Research department focuses on making scholarly work widely available and accessible through the coordination of the fellowship program and public programming that combines academic research with exhibition-related events. Across the institution—from the classroom to the gallery, from publications to this website—we utilize digital media to facilitate and share original research. This section outlines current programming and provides a repository for past scholarly content.
Illustration of a Zhou-dynasty court official wearing the Dark and Straight Robe, according to Nie Chongyi’s Sanli tu of 961. After the Xinding Sanli tu edition of 1175.

The Confucian Ritual Classics served as foundational texts for the design of the Chinese imperial state cult and elite ancestral rites. As such they necessitated a considerable amount of commentary on the appearance of the ritual objects they mention. Illustrations were essential to this commentarial tradition and come down to us in books from the Song period onward. This symposium, organized in conjunction with the Focus Project exhibition Design by the Book: Chinese Ritual Objects and the Sanli tu, examines the early iterations of classical ritual imagery, notably Nie Chongyi’s Sanli tu of 961, the oldest extant example. Papers will address various aspects of the pictorial genre, from its significance for the study of antiquity and antiquities, to its position in the history of painting, to its utility for designing classical ritual paraphernalia.


10:30 am

Ivan Gaskell
Professor, Curator and Head of the Focus Gallery Project, Bard Graduate Center
Welcome



10:40 am

François Louis
Associate Professor, Bard Graduate Center
Introduction



11 am

Jeffrey Moser
Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Brown University
Nie Chongyi’s Visual Hermeneutics


11:30 am

Jonathan Hay
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Professor of Fine Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
The Visual Rhetoric of Figure Painting in Nie Chongyi’s World

12 pm

Lunch Break

2 pm

Suzanne Cahill
Professor Emerita of Chinese History, University of California, San Diego
An Urgent Matter of Cosmic Harmony: Citing the Ritual Classics in Tang Court Arguments over Dress



2:30 pm

Ya-hwei Hsu
Associate Professor of History, National Taiwan University
The Sanli tu during the Southern Song and Yuan Periods: Formats and Functions

3 pm

Coffee Break

3:15 pm

Yunchiahn C. Sena
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History, Wesleyan University
An Ordered Universe: The Connection and Contention between Sanli tu and Xuanhe bogu tu

3:45 pm

Pengliang Lu
Henry A. Kissinger Curatorial Fellow, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Designing Classical Ritual Vessels in Fifteenth-Century China



4:15 pm

Reception