Date: 10 April 2026 (Friday)
Time: 12:00–2:00 PM
Venue: Room 202, Cheng Ming Building, New Asia College, CUHK
Language: English
Light lunch will be provided
Register here
Abstract:
Pingcheng, the capital of the Northern Wei dynasty from 398 to 494, was one of the largest cities in early medieval China. During the fifth century, more than one million migrants arrived in Pingcheng from the Eurasian Steppe in the north, the Korean Peninsula in the northeast, Central Asia in the west, and the region inhabited by Han Chinese in the south. These multiple waves of mass migration created an unprecedented level of transcultural interactions and generated a rich corpus of visual culture. This talk adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines art history, history, and archaeology to uncover the innovative and hybrid forms of visual arts developed at Pingcheng. By analyzing mortuary remains, including entombed inscriptions, mural paintings, and funerary objects, I explore various roles migrants played in creating new visual rhetoric at this cosmopolitan center. More specifically, the talk highlights three groups often underrepresented in transmitted texts—women, eunuchs, and foreigners—to reconstruct a more complex and nuanced narrative than that told in the official history.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Fan Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Asian Art, Jessie J. Poesch Professorship in Art at Tulane University and a visiting scholar at the Institute of Chinese Studies at CUHK. Having received her PhD from New York University, Dr. Zhang specializes in the art and material culture of Early Medieval China (4th to 6th centuries CE). Her research explores the construction of identities in the process of cultural exchange, the cross-continental movement of objects and people, the entanglement between art, humans, and the environment, as well as the intersection between funerary art and Buddhist art. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Study, the Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars, and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, among others.
