20th-century Chinese painting to be art historian's topic

Northwestern University art historian Sarah E. Fraser will lecture on ?The Imaginative Frontier in 20th-Century Chinese Painting? at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 17, in Emerson Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public.

Fraser?s talk will explore the discovery of history-changing artifacts and their relationship to nationalism. During the 1920s and 1930s Chinese scholars embarked on a reassessment of the past through new research methodologies. Fanning out to the frontier, anthropologists, ethnographers, archaeologists, and nascent art historians created revised histories for the new republic. The search for ?primitive? arts and peoples in the frontier became part of a larger effort to establish a multicultural history of earlier China and the boundaries of modern China.

Fraser is an associate professor of art history who earned a Ph.D. degree at the University of California at Berkeley. She teaches and researches primarily Chinese painting with an emphasis on questions of artistic enterprise in medieval Buddhist art and national identity formation through archaeological and ethnographic projects in the Republican period (1912-1949).

Her books include Performing the Visual: Buddhist Wall Painting Practice in China and Central Asia, 618-960 (Stanford University Press, 2004), which concerns Chinese theories of spontaneity and workshop production in the middle period. Performing was nominated for the College Art Association?s annual award for best art history book 2005 and was recognized as a Choice Outstanding Academic title in 2004. Fraser?s edited volume on Buddhist material culture titled Merit, Opulence and the Buddhist Network of Wealth (Shanghai Fine Arts Publishers, 2003) contains the Chinese proceedings of a major conference she organized with Peking University in 2001.

Her articles and essays include contributions to Artibus Asiae, Orientations, L?art de Dunhuang la Biblioth que nationale de France, Asia Major, and the Tenth Tibetan Studies Conference, Oxford University. In addition, she was the chief editor of wall painting and sculpture for the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, part of ARTstor?a new genre of web-based, art history research publications.

She has received fellowships from the Getty Center for Arts and Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, National Academy of Sciences, the Luce Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.

Fraser has directed major international research projects on Buddhist art at Northwestern. She served as Art History Department chair from 2004 to 2007 and director of graduate studies from 2000 to 2003. She is a Frederick Burkhardt Fellow, an honor awarded for ambitious cross-disciplinary projects, from 2007 to 2010. This academic year she is in residence as a Getty Scholar in Los Angeles finishing a manuscript titled What is Chinese About Chinese Art? Archaeology, Identity, and Politics, 1928-1947.

(Image above left: detail of a scene from the Yin-hs excavation, 1937.)