RAS Art Focus

China's Arts and Aesthetics of the Past:

Art, Display and Performance in Prehistoric China

Sunday, 16 March 2025

3:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Curated and moderated by RAS Art Focus Convener and Art Historian Julie Chun, we continue our studies in the 2024-2025 series China's Arts and Aesthetics of the Past as we delve into the material culture of the recent and distant history to assess how objects ranging from imperial patronage to utilitarian handicrafts have shaped China's aesthetics through the ages.

Material records of art and display are a sure sign of human presence. This lecture by Ed Allen, Postdoctoral Researcher of Chinese Archeology at Fudan University, will take us back 30000 years, to China's earliest known excavated adornments. We will follow this through the emergence of settled agriculture in the Chinese heartland, the rise of complex societies across China and emergence of the traditional Chinese state. We will examine how art, display and society variously intertwined across these separate phases. The lecture will serve as an introduction to the riches of archaeology in China and how archaeology can impact how we think about art and display even in the Instagram Era.