Katie Ryor, Tanaka Memorial Professor of International Understanding and Art History, gave a lecture, “Not-so-Famous Plants: Garden Culture, Botanical Knowledge, and Regional Painting Traditions in Ming China,” at the University of Pennsylvania. Her lecture presented her most current research as part of her Senior Hart Fellowship at the National Museum of Asian Art.
Scholarship on the bird-and-flower genre of Chinese painting has almost exclusively focused on their function as visual rebuses that convey auspicious messages or has explored the ways that the scholar-elite used imagery of flora and fauna for expressive purposes. In the case of paintings of flora, both of these interpretative paths have also focused on well-known plants that are multivalent and have a long history of symbolic use in poetry and other forms of literature. Ryor’s lecture examined a group of anonymous paintings that date to the Ming dynasty but have spurious signatures of various famous specialists in the genre from the 10th-13the centuries. These paintings depict plants that are rarely celebrated in literature but have important uses as medicine, food and dyes. In this talk, Ryor suggests that detailed images of nature had a large audience during the Ming period and that the market for such paintings is tied to literati interests in botany and medicine, as well as notions of the garden as a space to harmonize with the cosmos.