OFF-SITE EVENT Re-Presenting Emptiness: Zen & Art in Medieval Japan

Saturday, April 14 & Sunday April 15
9:30 am – 5 pm

Held at the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art, Princeton University.

“Re-Presenting Emptiness” attempts to articulate new frames of reference for the artifacts associated with Japanese Zen monastic communities in the medieval period. Bringing together leading scholars in the disciplines of history, literature, religious studies and art history from Japan, Europe and the United States, the symposium provides diverse and interregional perspectives on the little understood objects that mediated relations between Chan/Zen monks and their dharma brethren. Robes, calligraphies, portraits, landscape paintings and poem-picture scrolls are examined in terms of their rhetorical and institutional functions. By offering new possibilities for understanding the formal and representational uses of these objects, the “Zen” of “Zen art” can be removed from the realm of the inscrutable and understood in the context of multiple social realities and historical conditions .Sponsored by the Tang Center, the Department of Art and Archaeology, the Buddhist Studies Workshop, and the East Asian Studies Program, Princeton University, and the Princeton University Art Museum.

Admission is free, but registration is required. To register online, visit http://web.princeton.edu/sites/TangCenter/zenandart/registration.html or call (609) 258-1741.