Member Events
Buddhist Art on the Silk Road: 5th to 7th Century Sculpture at Kizil
With Yueni Zhong
When: Saturday, July 5
Time: 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Place: Education Studio
Fee: $15 members, $25 non-members
Note: Space limited, registration required
Discover the ancient site of Kizil, situated along the Northern branch of the Silk Road. Kizil, 75 miles from Kucha, consists of 236 rock-cut caves and some 1000 square meters of wall paintings. It is one of China’s most important Buddhist cave complexes. The site was heavily plundered in the 19th century by foreign archeologists. This lecture will focus on the corpus of mural fragments taken to Germany in the early 20th century and subsequently destroyed during World War II.
Yueni Zhong is a fourth-year student in the Ph.D. program in the History of Art Department at U.C. Berkeley under the guidance of Patricia Berger. Yueni has traveled extensively during the past two years to various Buddhist cave-temple sites across Northern and Northwest China to research and contextualize Kizil¹s role in Kucha, a Buddhist kingdom active in the 1st through 9th centuries CE. She has also researched the transmission and translation of the vast body of Buddhist scripture throughout China.
Visit to C. V. Starr East Asian Library, U.C. Berkeley
SOLD OUT
When: Saturday, July 12
Time: 10:30 am through lunch
Place: C. V. Starr East Asian Library, U.C.
Berkeley Campus (map will follow)
Fee: SOLD OUT
Newly opened this spring, the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the most important Asian libraries in the country, housing some 900,000
treasures of primarily Chinese, Japanese and Korean materials, ranging from oracle bones to 20th century manuscripts. We will see rare woodblocks and woodblock prints, some rare maps and scrolls, contemporary art from East Asia, and even Buddhist sculpture. This will be a very special look at the library’s most significant holdings, including the most rare manuscripts and art not normally accessible to the public.
Situated in the center of campus close to Memorial Glade, the Library itself is a wonderful piece of architecture designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects. Especially noteworthy are the exterior bronze screens made in China on three sides of the building.
The Radiant Trappings of Earthly and Spiritual Power in the Ming Period
With Arthur Leeper
When: Sunday, July 20
Time: 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Place: Education Studio
Fee: $15 members; $25 non-members
Note: Space is limited, registration required
The distribution of lavish silk costumes played a key role in maintaining imperial authority during the Yuan period, but during the succeeding Ming period, court dress became systematized to such a degree that it visually signaled an individual's exact social and official status.
Included in the current exhibition, "Power and Glory: Court Arts of China's Ming Dynasty" are a group of remarkable Ming court costumes, textiles and rarely seen paintings of officials and emperors of the Ming period.
While enormous resources were devoted to court costumes in the Ming Dynasty, equally stunning ecclesiastic textiles were produced, of which only a handful survive. One such example, the staggering eleven-foot Buddhist embroidery (see detail photo) is being exhibited for the first time.
Drawing on photos of other examples and fragments, Arthur Leeper will seek to explain the context of the remarkable textiles and images of textiles in this exhibition.
Arthur Leeper has been a student of and a dealer in Asian antiques since 1970, traveling during that period on numerous study and buying trips to Nepal, Sikkim, India, Tibet, China and Japan, pursuing his particular interest in Chinese decorative arts, especially textiles and lacquer. He has written for Arts of Asia Magazine and helped write the catalog of the pioneering 1983 Textile Museum, Washington D.C. show “Temple, Household, Horseback; Rugs of the Tibetan Plateau”. He has lectured on textiles and carpets at The Textile Museum, the de Young Museum, the Society for Asian Art, the International Conference on Carpets, and UC Berkeley.
Early Meissen Porcelain:
The Influence of Chinese and Japanese Taste on the First European Porcelain Factory
SOLD OUT - SOLD OUT - SOLD OUT
When: Saturday, July 26
Time: 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Place: To be disclosed to registrants
Fee: $20 members, $30 non-members
Note: Space limited, registration required
In the first decade of the eighteenth century, the King of Saxony, Augustus the Strong, a prodigious collector of Chinese and Japanese porcelains, found that much of his income was going straight to Asia. He used threats to cajole an unsuccessful alchemist, Johann Friedrich Boettger, to create true hard paste porcelain of the Chinese type. And when he did, the manufacture of porcelain in Europe began in earnest. The earliest production of the factory was based in great part on Chinese and Japanese ceramic prototypes already in the royal collections.
Join us for a tour of an outstanding collection of early Meissen conducted by its proud owner, a scholar and historian with great depth of knowledge about his subject. He will share with us many fine examples illustrating the shapes and decoration inspired by the Asian originals. Don’t miss this exciting and stimulating event.
