新书： Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial

Becoming Guanyin

Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China

Yuhang Li

Columbia University Press

PUB DATE: July 2019

ISBN: 9780231190121

272 pages

FORMAT: Hardcover

LIST PRICE: $65.00£50.00

The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin.

Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system. Attending to the fabrication and use of “women’s things” by secular women, Li offers new insight into the relationships between worshipped and worshipper in Buddhist practice. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies, Becoming Guanyin is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay among material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.

 THE AUTHOR

YUHANG LI

an assistant professor of Chinese art in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Education

University of Chicago, Ph.D.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, M.A.

Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China, B.A.

Research Interests

Chinese Art, Gender and material practice in late imperial China. Lay Buddhist women, the cult of Guanyin and image making, women artists. History of Chinese textile and costume, opera and Chinese visual culture, Qing court art and Empress Dowager Cixi.

Yuhang Li is, by training, an art historian. However, her take on Guanyin is beyond the realms of art history. Li analyzes the female portrayal of Guanyin through paintings, material culture of embroidery, theatrical display of dance, archaeological objects, scripture, and literature.

——Chün-fang Yü, author of Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara

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