@article{Water:1604,
      recid = {1604},
      author = {Feng, Anne Ning},
      title = {Water, Ice, Lapis lazuli: The Metamorphosis of Pure Land  Art in Tang China},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2018-08},
      pages = {309},
      abstract = {Western Pure Land transformation tableaux are images that  depict a distant paradise governed by Amitābha Buddha, who  vowed to save the souls of sentient beings from our current  world. In Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.) China, Amitābha’s  paradise emerged through painted images as a majestic  water-bound palace. This dissertation reconceives of the  Pure Land tableau—not as a straightforward reflection of  Buddhist doctrine or a resource for the historical study of  Tang architecture—but as an innovative mode of  image-making, one that through painting transformed  conceptions of pictorial space and the possibilities of  vision in East Asian art. 

The Pure Land tableau reveals a  daring new attitude towards the visual depiction of  material phenomena in the Tang Empire, encouraging viewers  to see through forms, from bodies, to buildings and  landscapes. The Tang Pure Land tableau emerged at the  intersection of two developments: First, the tableau  allowed painters to explore the power of their own craft as  mode of world making. Second, Pure Land visuality was the  product of a new imperial vision, with a controlling gaze  that sees through architecture, organizing a cosmopolitan  synthesis of Chinese, Indic, and Central Asian forms. I  argue that the Pure Land tableau became a threshold for new  practices of envisioning transparency, the transmutation of  substance, and the transformation of space. These  developments coalesce around understandings of water as the  conceptual ground—a medium and metaphor—for the Pure  Land.

This study examines Pure Land transformation  tableaux at a cave complex called the Dunhuang Grottoes in  west China, during the strongest presence of Tang control  in the region between the 640s and 770s. This work consists  of four chapters, each with a different emphasis on the  Pure Land tableau. The first chapter reviews recent  scholarship on Pure Land art at Dunhuang. The second  chapter focuses on the Ajātaśatru Narrative and theories of  viewing related to landscape imagery, the third chapter  deals with the Sixteen Meditations and the painter’s craft  of representing meditational processes. The last chapter  discusses the phenomenological experience of the Pure Land  tableau through the device of the “lotus pond”. Taken  together, these chapters argue for a period of striking  innovation in Chinese art, one that led to a dynamic  rethinking of the relation of the human body to the surface  of an illusionistic painting.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1604},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1604},
}