Saturday University: Silk Road Environmentalism and the Arts

Welcome to Saturday University, a monthly lecture series featuring experts from around the world. Gain new insights on Asia throughout time as our visiting scholars, authors, artists, and thought leaders delve into new themes each season.

Silk Road Environmentalism and the Arts

Sonya Lee

Since its introduction in the nineteenth century, the term “Silk Road” has become synonymous with exchange, connectivity, and possibility. The cultures and peoples that it encompasses span the Eurasia continent and beyond. Their stories of living along the crossroads of the world continue to inspire today.

The allure of the Silk Road’s fabled past and the potential for reinvention offers a flexible, generative framework to reconsider contemporary issues and practices. This lecture uses the subject’s salient themes and iconic sites to think about climate and the environment from new perspectives. It draws evidence from the wall paintings inside Buddhist cave temples along the Silk Road, which have preserved memorable images of how local communities had dealt with water hazards and insecurities through religious devotion and practice. The study shows that the inhabitants’ drive for beauty and creativity needs to be understood alongside their will to overcome difficult terrains and changing climates for survival.

Sonya S. Lee is Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Religion at the University of Southern California. She is currently Department Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Dr. Lee has published widely on Buddhist material culture of China and Central Asia. She is the author of Temples in the Cliffside: Buddhist Art of Sichuan (University of Washington Press, 2021) and Surviving Nirvana: Death of the Buddha in Chinese Visual Culture (Hong Kong University Press, 2010). She is also Editor-in-Chief for Grove Art Online, the premier online resource for the visual arts administered by Oxford University Press. Dr. Lee has received prestigious fellowships and honors for her research, including grants from the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Mellon Foundation, Getty Foundation, Japan Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, and American Council of Learned Societies. Her current book project is a study of the art and technology of the art and technology of wall painting of the Silk Road that engages debates in new materialism and posthumanism.

Tickets

$15

$10 SAM members & students with ID

Tickets include gallery access

Image Provided by Mogao 9: Dunhuang Academy.