Date: 11 October 2026 (Sunday)
Time: 10:00 - 17:00
Venue: LI-6376, 6/F, Li Dak Sum Yip Yio Chin Building, City University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Speaker: Professor Jennifer Purtle
Registration:Please complete the online registration form HERE on or before 5 October 2026.
Successful registrants will receive a confirmation email not later than 9 October 2026.

Abstract

Knowledge of the larger corpus of and context for Song-dynasty painting is elusive. Few surviving paintings are genuine, let alone autograph works. Furthermore, matching known painters’ names to surviving paintings and vice-versa was already a problem circa 1006 when the Sichuan-based connoisseur Huang Xiufu articulated it in re Shu painting. Moreover, the emphasis on court painting in the Song capital of Kaifeng, Henan, has left knowledge of the southern geography of Song painting lacking: in established narratives, the Song absorbed the artistic excellence of the vanquished Five Dynasties. Therefore, little scholarly attention has been paid to the post-conquest, Song-dynasty afterlives of Five Dynasties artistic centers. To intervene in this state of the field, this paper seeks to understand critical expectations for paintings of south China in the Song consciousness. In particular, it engages works that represent flora, fauna, and landscape associated with named localities in Fujian and Guangdong. Based on texts and placeholder paintings for lost works, and using these materials to define the oeuvres of named artists, this paper aims to show how these artists worked in ways that sustained local pictorial traditions of south China in contradistinction to those of north China reified by the Kaifeng-based court.

Biography

Jennifer Purtle, PhD (Yale), 2001, is associate professor of Chinese and East Asian art history in the Art History Department at the University of Toronto. She has completed the manuscript, Placing Fujian Painting in Late Imperial Fujian, and is finishing another, Forms of Cosmopolitanism in Sino-Mongol Quanzhou. Her 2024 article, “Rock, Paper, Scissors: Durable Ephemera and Networks of Stone in Quanzhou’s Zhenguo Pagoda,” went viral (10,000+ views, 3000+ downloads) in its first eighteen months in print. Curator and author of Reading Revolution: Art and Literacy during China’s Cultural Revolution (2016), she co-edited Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture from the Treaty Ports to World War II (2009). She served as principal investigator of the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories Project “Global and Postglobal Perspectives on Medieval Art and Art History” (2014–17).