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[Bluesky, 10/21/24] I was talking with the graphic novelist Wendy Xu about Dunhuang art and the history of copying in the Chinese painting tradition, which led me to some thoughts on outline and color, cartoons/graphic novels and Chinese painting. Much of the first modern research into Dunhuang painting was done by artists, and their main
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[Bluesky, 6/12/24] How realistic do your little guys need to be in order to ensure that they turn up in your afterlife? A post about tomb figurines. (Han tomb figurine, men playing the game of liubo) Ancient Chinese elite tombs (of the prehistoric and Shang periods and into the early Zhou) often included two kinds
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(I’m restarting my habit of posting research-related stuff over here, even as I continue to nerd out over historical Chinese dramas over on Bluesky – the drama posts will not be making their appearance here) I am not primarily a poetry person, nor even really a literature person. I enjoy poetry, but that’s not the
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Over the past few years I’ve been in conversation with a number of artists and graphic novelists about vessels and objects from ancient East Asia that look like animals. For various reasons it’s come to the point that I would like to have the links I’ve collected all in one place, so here we go.
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I’m a member of a group of chamber singers, and we had a concert in December at a little Episcopal church in town that was new to me. It has these very striking memorial windows in the chancel, and I asked the priest about them, but he didn’t know where they came from. I (and
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I forget sometimes that though I first went to China only in 1988, I’m old enough to be connected, personally, with some of the earlier witnesses of China’s long twentieth century, which leaves me only one degree of separation from many others. Especially living in Honolulu: I’ve met Sun Yat-sen’s granddaughter and Zhang Xueliang’s cardiologist,
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I said Kaddish for my Chinese auntie during Kol Nidre on Sunday night, as the threads of my life converged. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, has just passed, the gates of heaven closing for another year – and when they’ve closed for the Jews of Hawai’i, they’ve closed for good, since we’re the last
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Medieval Buddhist of the Day: Yang Jingyuan 陽景元, who sponsored a Guanyin image in 523 for no particular reason that he recorded. (His inscription is recorded in the collection 金石補正，卷13.) Buddhist monuments that are commissioned by groups of donors, usually organized into Buddhist charitable societies called yiyi 邑義 or yishe 邑社, often have long lists
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OK. If you haven’t read the poetry battle post from two days ago, go back and read it now. It introduces the two wives of Wang Su, Lady Xie and the imperial princess, and their rivalry, expressed in verse form, over their shared husband. Intrigued by this, I started looking in to what I could
Medieval Buddhist of the Day 