Imagining Sculpture

The celebrated lineage of sculpture from Classical Greece to the Renaissance and neoclassicism is a European idea. In China statues, carvings and figural objects were produced for millennia as icons, representations, decorations and effigies. But compared to the lofty arts of painting and calligraphy or the preeminence of ancient bronze and jade antiquities, sculpture was unrefined and unworthy of study. There was no tradition of sculpture in China: no history of celebrated masters and masterpieces, no private or public collections, no specialized scholarship or connoisseurship. The term “sculpture” was not translated into Chinese until the beginning of the twentieth century.

As a response, the presentation attempts to imagine sculpture-like objects in China outside of the dominant ideals of sculpture. The narrative moves between China and Japan, England, France, Italy, and the United States from the fourteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. We will follow the story of travelers, scholars, officials, collectors, dealers and others in their entanglements with sculpture-like objects in various guises and settings.

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Stanley Abe is an Associate Professor of Art and Art History in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Abe’s principal research interests are Chinese Buddhist art, contemporary Chinese art, Asian American art, Abstract Expressionism, and the collecting of Chinese sculpture. His book Ordinary Images (2002) won the Freer Gallery/Smithsonian Institution: Shimada Prize. In 2007, Abe received a grant from the American Philosophical Society and a Fellowship for University Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities in recognition of his work.

From 2011-2018, Abe was the Editor in Chief and Chair of the Editorial Board of Archives of Asian Art. He was a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of Tate Modern Research Centre: Asia between 2016-19. Abe is currently writing a narrative account of how Chinese sculpture came into existence as a category of Fine Art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Inaugurated in 2004, the Bettman Lectures are an annual program of lectures in art history sponsored by Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. Endowed with a bequest from Linda Bettman, a former graduate student of the department, the lectures are named in her honor.