Premodern East Asia: New Horizons #: Becoming Guanyin

Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China

Premodern East Asia: New Horizons #: Becoming Guanyin
Yuhang Li
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Paperback
h235 x 156mm - 312pg
18 Jan 2022 US
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9780231190138
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The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokite&sacutevara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system. Attending to the fabrication and use of "women' s things" by secular women, Li offers new insight into the relationships between worshipped and worshipper in Buddhist practice. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies, Becoming Guanyin is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay between material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.

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[A] lavishly-illustrated, impeccably-researched, ground-breaking book. * Asian Review of Books * Well executed and is highly informative too. . . it is a recommended work for more advanced researchers and scholars of East Asian Buddhism. * Religious Studies Review * Virtually every page of Becoming Guanyin demonstrates Li' s impressively wide-ranging erudition and her keen powers of observation and analysis. . . . a major contribution to scholarship. * NanNu * Li has expertly demonstrated a wholly new way of studying the religious expression of women in imperial China. Those with an interest in Chinese religion, particularly Buddhism, as well as those interested in gender studies and religion, and the anthropology of religion, would find this volume invaluable. -- Joseph Chadwin, University of Vienna * Religious Studies Review * Yuhang Li is, by training, an art historian. However, her take on Guanyin goes beyond the realms of art history. Li analyzes the female portrayal of Guanyin through paintings, material culture of embroidery, theatrical display of dance, archaeological objects, scripture, and literature. This is truly an interdisciplinary work. -- Chun-fang Yu, author of Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara What distinguishes Becoming Guanyin from other excellent work on women and religion in late imperial China is its careful attention to the material culture of religious practice, from objects women made to objects of worship. The book should appeal to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines-history, art history, religion, literature, and gender studies. -- Ann Waltner, coauthor of Family: A World History Becoming Guanyin is a truly innovative and interdisciplinary book that explores how lay women expressed religious devotion in late imperial China. Through a critical examination of women' s hairpins, embroidery made from women' s hair, and courtesan dance performances, Yuhang Li responds with intelligence to current scholarship on visual and material culture, women' s history, and religious studies. Highly recommended! -- Shih-shan Susan Huang, author of Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China
Yuhang Li is an assistant professor of Chinese art in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She cocurated with Judith Zeitlin the exhibition Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture and coedited the resulting catalog based on the exhibition.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780231190138
Published: 18 Jan 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 235mm
Width: 156mm
Pages: 312

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