Sarcophagus stories and crossing between two worlds: a Central Asian diplomat in 6th century China
WHAT:
“Sarcophagus stories and crossing between two worlds: a Central Asian diplomat in 6th century China”, an RASBJ online talk by curator and archaeologist Yin Cao, followed by QA.
WHEN:
Sept. 29, Wednesday, 7:00-8:00 PM Beijing Time (online)
HOW TO JOIN THE EVENT:
Register at least 24 hrs before the talk.
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MORE ABOUT THE EVENT:
Through a 6th century marble sarcophagus, now in the Shanxi Museum in Taiyuan, art curator Yin Cao tells the story of a Central Asian diplomat named Yu Hong (533 or 534 -592) during the peak of the Silk Road’s glory. The envoy lived in the period when interactions between the East and the West flourished along this route. The coexistence of traditional Chinese and Western cultural and artistic elements on the sarcophagus suggests a period of exceptional openness. The talk will explain how different ideas, religions and art styles intermingled, were absorbed and, ultimately transformed each other to create a new aesthetic vocabulary. Yin will use the example of the grape motif on the sarcophagus in the rich decorative repertory in the Yu Hong tomb in order to analyse and demonstrate how western art inspired Chinese artisans. She will also examine how these artists ingeniously mediated and crafted these inspirations.
MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Yin Cao has been the Curator of Chinese Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia since August 2011. Prior to that she was the Deputy Director at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, Beijing, China, and a researcher at the University Museum of the National University of Singapore. Trained as an archaeologist at Peking University and Harvard University, she has participated in several archaeological excavations in both China and Israel. She received museum management training at the Smithsonian Institution and the Freer/Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC. She has curated several exhibitions including the following, and wrote and edited catalogues for them: the inaugural exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University (1993); “A Silk Road saga — the sarcophagus of Yu Hong” (2013), and “Tang: Treasures from the Silk Road Capital” (2016); “Heaven and earth in Chinese art: treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei” (2019), and“The way we eat” (2021). She is on the Board of the Museum of Chinese in Australia (MOCA).
