Lecture | China Seminar
The Ten Kings of Earth Prisons: Theatricality of Death in Late Imperial China
- Date
- Wednesday 8 November 2023
- Time
- Location
-
University Library
Witte Singel 27
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- Vossius Room
Abstract
This talk takes as its starting point five paintings from the collection of the National Board of Antiquities in Finland. These paintings feature five of the Kings of the Earth Prisons (地獄) and were acquired by Danish businessman Sophus Black in Beijing in the early 20th century. The Kings were often depicted as a set of ten paintings, each King ruling its own underworld court. Since these particular five paintings do not have inscriptions to tell us which of the Kings survive, the talk will begin by examining the visual clues in the paintings in order to suggest how it might be possible to establish the sequence of the journey.
In addition, the talk explores the ways in which the paintings could be related to theatre. This part of the discussion brings in other sets from different museums: two incomplete sets – one from Musée Guimet and another one from Harvard University Art Museums – and a complete set from the Victoria and Albert Museum. These paintings show that the theme of the Ten Kings was not strictly based on the early medieval apocryphal sutra of The Ten Kings, but that the visual representations had over the centuries drawn elements from diverse literary and theatrical sources.
Short Bio
Minna Törmä is Senior Lecture in History of Art at the University of Glasgow and Adjunct Professor of Art History at the University of Helsinki. She has published widely on landscape studies and history of collecting, including Landscape Experience as Visual Narrative: Northern Song Dynasty Landscape Handscrolls in the Li Cheng – Yan Wengui Tradition (Finnish Academy of Science 2002), Enchanted by Lohans: Osvald Sirén’s Journey into Chinese Art (Hong Kong University Press 2013) and Nordic Private Collections of Chinese Objects (Routledge 2020). Her current research focuses on one hand East Asian elements in gardens of National Trust for Scotland and on the other hand on the visual imagery of the Ten Kings.
This event is sponsored by The Hulsewé-Wazniewski Foundation.