Becoming Guanyin: A Book Event with Author Yuhang Li
The George Washington University
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Kim-Renaud East Asian Humanities Lecture Series
Friday, October 23, 2020 4:00 PM-5:30 PM EDT via WebEx Events
About the Event:
The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system.
Speaker:
Yuhang Li is an associate professor of Chinese art in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests cover a wide range subjects and mediums of visual and material cultures in late imperial China, such as the cult of Guanyin and gendered image making, mimesis and devotional practice, textile and paper arts, opera and Chinese visual culture. She is the author of the book Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2020) and co-curator and co-editor of the exhibition and resulting catalog Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture (Smart Museum and University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Discussant:
Xiaofei Kang is Associate Professor of Religion at the George Washington University. She has a Ph.D. in Chinese history from Columbia University (2000) and has published books and articles on gender, ethnicity and Chinese religion. She is now finishing a manuscript on gender, religion and twentieth-century Communist revolution in China.
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The event is open to the public. Registered guests will receive confirmation email with details for joining Webex 24 hours prior the event.
