MAUDE I. KERNS SYMPOSIUM

TEXTiles: Intertwining of Texts and Textiles from Afro-Eurasia and the Americas

8:00 AM - 5:00 PM, November 16 - 17, 2024

Gerlinger Lounge, University of Oregon

Detail of Festival Badge (Buzi) with “Long Life” (Shou) Character in the form of a Lotus-Based Lantern Design. Chinese; Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Gold silk satin embroidered with multicolored silk and couched with gold-wrapped thread, H. 20 11/16 x W. 20 7/8 inches. Murray Warner Collection, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, MWCH46:117

Background

According to Irene Emery (The Primary Structure of Fabrics, 1966), a “textile” is not a “fabric” and involves different types of interlacing. The fact that text and textile in Euro-American languages share a common Latin root, texere, or weaving, has provided scholars with the linguistic and conceptual framework to explore the close-knit relations between the two. Broadening our perspectives, the earliest usages of words text and textile coincided with the end of the Mongol period, the disuse of the ancient “Silk Roads,” and the simultaneous increase in the European documentation of the new textiles from the East. Meanwhile, textiles and texts were also intertwined in East Asia throughout much of the history of writing, evidenced by the use of the common “thread” radical, deriving from the hierography for a “twine,” in characters for both textile and paper. Across cultures, textiles served as a key receptacle for communal memories and a vehicle for storytelling.

From antiquity to the modern period, texts and textiles often journeyed the same paths across the Afro-Eurasian and the American worlds. Textile terms of both foreign and domestic origins are broadly found in documents and inscriptions as records of the physical movement of the material and as literary metaphors. Textiles clothed physical bodies and religious texts and any secular writing of importance, for instance, in the forms of elaborate—and often imported—brocades used for scroll mountings, bookbinding, and additional protective pouches. Inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s apt characterization of the agency of things, “[if] human actors encode things with significance…it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context” (The Social Life of Things, 2011), this interdisciplinary symposium aims to bring together international scholars to expand our investigation on the interwoven relationship between texts and textiles by focusing on their mobility across space and time.

Download Symposium Program Here

Organizers

Mariachiara Gasparini

Mariachiara Gasparini

Associate Professor of Chinese Art and Architectural History, College of Design

chiarag@uoregon.edu

Mariachiara Gasparini is an Associate Professor of Chinese Art and Architectural History at the University of Oregon. Previously, she taught Asian Art History at the University of California, Riverside, San Jose State University, San Francisco State University, and Santa Clara University. She studied Oriental Languages and Civilization at the University of Oriental Studies in Naples, Italy, earned an M.A. in East Asian Art History from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London, U.K., and received her Ph.D. in Transcultural Studies: Global Art History from Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, Germany. Gasparini’s interests include historical, theoretical, and visual investigation of Eurasian art and culture history. Her research focuses on Chinese and Central Asian textiles, material culture, wall painting, artist’s praxis, and Sino-Iranian and Turko-Mongol interactions. She collaborates with museums and institutions worldwide. She is the author of Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textiles (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019), and “Beyond Space and Time: Sino-Iranian Textiles and the Creation of Eurasian Religious Material and Visual Cultures of Power and Sanctity,” in Persian Cultures of Power and the Entanglement of the Afro-Eurasian World, edited by Matthew Canepa (Getty Research Institute Publications, 2024). Gasparini is a recipient of the Henry Luce Foundation China Studies Early Career Fellowship 21-22. Her current research project focuses on Tuyuhun and early Tibetan material culture along an external branch of the main Silk Road, across Qinghai and Sichuan Provinces.

Akiko Walley

Akiko Walley

Maude I. Kerns Associate Professor of Japanese Art, College of Design

awalley@uoregon.edu

Akiko Walley received her MA in Regional Studies East Asia and PhD in Art History from Harvard University. She specializes in Japanese Buddhist art of the seventh and eighth centuries. Buddhism is the bedrock of every aspect of Japanese lives even today. Walley focuses on the incipient period of Japanese Buddhism to reconsider the idea of “transmission” (denrai). She is the author of Constructing the Dharma King: The Hōryūji Shaka Triad and the Birth of the Prince Shōtoku Cult (Japanese Visual Culture Series, vol. 15; Leiden: Brill, 2015). Her work has been published in journals including Ars Orientalis, Archives of Asian Art, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Artibus Asiae, Religions, and International Journal of Comic Art. Walley’s current book-length project investigates early Buddhist relic devotion in Japan in a trans-Asian context, focusing on the performative nature of Buddhist reliquaries. She also has secondary and tertiary research interests in topics such as: Edo-period (1615-1868) literati painting; Buddhist scriptures and the materiality of East Asian calligraphy; Edo-period luxurious prints (surimono); Contemporary prints, particularly by Kusama Yayoi; and manga modes of expression and the impact of onomatopoeia on animation sound effects.

Sponsors

This symposium has been made possible through the generous support of the following sponsors:

  • Maude I. Kerns Endowement

  • Yoko Mcclain Lecture Series

  • Oregon Humanities Center

  • Department of Asian Studies

  • Center for Asian and Pacific Studies

  • Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art