A Phantom Gift of Autumn Deer — Art History Endowed Lecture by Dr. Haun Saussy

Join Emory Art History on Tuesday, December 8 at 6pm in Ackerman Hall at the Carlos Museum for an endowed lecture:

A Phantom Gift of Autumn Deer Haun Saussy, PhD University Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilization & the Committee on Social Thought, The University of Chicago

Two hanging scrolls, perhaps from a larger group, known as “Deer in Autumn Woods” and presently in the National Palace Museum (Taipei) are recorded in the Song dynasty imperial collections from around the year 1050, but their peculiarities of style and technique have long made them stand out among Chinese painted landscapes. Do they belong in the history of Chinese landscape painting at all? Cultural explanations for their oddity have recently been proposed. This paper suggests rather that it is their status as “boundary objects”— objects that bear different meanings for different publics— that permits a fuller understanding of these artifacts.