Past Scholarly Activities

Prof. Lee's article, Fragments for Constructing a History of Southern Tang Painting (937-976), in volume 34 of the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies discusses painters, the kinds of paintings they produced, and some aspects of painting (such as the relationship between painting and poetry and calligraphy) during the Southern Tang Dynasty, a small and short-lived but artistically influential kingdom in war-torn, tenth-century China.

liao Prof. Lee recently presented a paper, "Weaving Palindromes and Reciting Sutras," for the 2004 New York Conference on Asian Studies. That paper examines murals from the tenth-century tomb of an aristocratic woman in a Qidan cemetary excavated in Inner Mongolia. These exquisite murals, accompanied by poetic inscriptions in Chinese, pose baffling questions about the geographical extent of Han Chinese culture and whether and how the semi-nomadic Qidan appropriated the imagery and styles of their sedentary rivals.

In summer 2004, Prof. Lee participated in the Third International Seminar on the Study of Dunhuang Art and Society at sites near the so-called Silk Road in western China (www.silk-road.com/toc/). She is studying Buddhist cave murals that date from the fourth to the fourteenth century and gathering materials for a future course on Buddhist art in Asia.

bridge With support from Educational Research and Development, Prof. Lee is developing for use in Art History/Asian Studies 013, "Stories and Scrolls", a website featuring Spring Festival on the River, a twelfth-century Chinese handscroll painting attributed to the painter Zhang Zeduan. Once completed, the site will allow students to upload their own colophons (textual responses that traditionally were appended to handscrolls) virtually to the digitized painting.


top: Zhao Gan, "Along the River at First Snow," detail. National Palace Museum collection. (Source: "Zhao Gan", Wuhan: Hubei meishu, 2000, n.p.)

middle: Baoshan Tomb 2, North mural, detail.

bottom: Zhang Zeduan, attrib., "Spring Festival on the River," detail. Palace Museum, Beijing. (Source: "Zhang Zeduan hui Qingming shanghe tu," Beijing: Rongbaozhai, 1997, cover illustration)