08 OCT 2026 (THU) 14:00-15:00
Departmental Research Seminars Series
Iterative Circuits: Chinese Painting and Japanese Art History
Date: 08 OCT 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 14:00-15:00 (HKT)
Venue: Chamber, Faculty of Social Sciences, 11/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Registration link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=109736
Abstract:
As a scholar of interconnected East Asian art histories based out of HKU’s Department of Art History, Caitlin Karyadi is motivated by moments of fissure between nationally bounded art historical narratives and physical objects that resist tidy summation. This talk takes the example of the Chinese painter Shen Nanpin (1682–ca. 1760), who, she argues, would not exist in histories of East Asian art without Japan. Nanpin traveled to Japan in 1731 and returned to China less than two years later. Despite his subsequent absence, in later decades he transformed into a canonical pillar of early modern Japanese painting. His historical memory is now contingent on this later Japanese reception, an outsized phenomenon that has eclipsed our ability to recover almost any trace of the individual himself.
Period records for Nanpin remain scant and inconclusive, but the extant works bearing his name number in the thousands. The superabundance of paintings attributed to Shen Nanpin comprise a complex portrait of a transregional and transhistorical visual phenomenon, all deceptively encapsulated in the name of one individual. In this talk, Karyadi analyzes a series of "Nanpin" works likely by different makers from China's Jiangnan region. As she demonstrates, Chinese workshops operated with an acute yet imperfect understanding of overseas demand and worked to satisfy an evolving Japanese market for the "Nanpin brand"—in the process fashioning an identity for the painter independent of the historical agent. As the first study to approach Nanpin as an assembled Sino-Japanese sensation rather than an influential Chinese patriarch, this paper explores the intimate circuits of production and reception that, just like her absent subject, cross geographic and disciplinary boundaries.
Professor Caitlin Karyadi
Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, HKU
Caitlin Karyadi is a historian of Japanese art and visual culture, specializing in early modern Japanese imagery and its transregional contexts. Her current book project re-evaluates processes of canonization across premodern East Asia through the example of the Chinese painter Shen Nanpin (1682–ca. 1760) and his outsized Japanese legacy. Karyadi previously worked as a curator. Her curated and co-curated exhibitions include Picturing Place in Japan (Princeton University Art Museum, 2018–2019), In the Making: The Practice of Painting in Early Modern Kyoto (Princeton University Art Museum, 2018–2019), Within and Without: Transformations in Chinese Landscapes (Cantor Arts Center, 2014–2015), and Mapping Edo: The Social and Political Geography of Early Modern Japan (Cantor Arts Center, 2013–2014), among others.
