CfA: Workshop – GRAA Works-in-progress Series (virtual)
The Collective on Gender, Religion, and the Arts of Asia (GRAA) is delighted to announce their second workshop event in 2025, to take place next week.
Our second speaker will present on Zoom next Friday, February 21st from 3:00 – 4:00 PM EST. In this meeting, Hannibal Taubes, a lecturer at the University of Bristol, will discuss work related to one chapter from his dissertation, Murals after Murals: Paint on Walls in Early-Modern North China. We are delighted to have Aurelia Campbell from Boston College join us in moderating the discussion. A full abstract for the paper can be found below.
To attend, please register for the Zoom meeting here: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/y7VdkckrTky_OS7H4sYt-A
Speaker: Hannibal Taubes
Paper Title: The Palace Beyond: Notes on Women and Verisimilitude in Chinese Deity-Temples, ~800 CE to Present
Abstract: This talk attempts a literary history of women and verisimilitude in the statues and murals of Chinese deity-temples. Even from the earliest layers of the pre-Qin literary canon, encounters with beguiling temple images, and with ambiguously present goddesses, engendered both iconographic rhapsody and ontological doubt in male writers. However, I here focus centrally on a now almost entirely lost and forgotten space within early-modern Chinese temple architecture, the “rear palace” (hougong) or “palace of repose” (qingong). From the late Tang onward, a new class of deity-temple began to incorporate special shrine rooms concealed behind the main altar, in which uncannily realistic images of women and domestic objects provoked both aesthetic and supernatural response. With the introduction of European visual techniques like point-perspective, cast-shadows, and chiaroscuro from the eighteenth century onward, these “rear palaces” became important sites of sub-elite artistic experimentation, in which temple artisans employed European techniques to structure iconic trespass between the alteric and the domestic, here and elsewhere. With this architectural and pictorial narrative as a historical background, I read a series of key scenes in the great Ming-Qing novels, in which transgression into these dangerously “realistic” temple spaces forms a central signifier and conceptual model of literary fictionality itself.
Bio: Hannibal Taubes completed his PhD in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department of UC Berkeley in fall 2024. He is currently a maternity-leave lecturer at the University of Bristol in the UK.