UT Humanities Center Eighth Annual Distinguished Lecture Series - Zsuzsanna Gulácsi

History of Manichaean Art in China

The recent discovery of Chinese Manichaean silk paintings shook up Manichaean studies during the past decade. This small but well-preserved corpus consists of six complete and three fragmentary silk hanging scrolls, eight of which are housed in various Japanese collections and one in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. While the visual language of these paintings reflects the norms of late medieval Chinese religious art (best known from Buddhist and Taoist images), their unique iconography and doctrinal content positively confirms their Manichaean identification. Professor Gulácsi will explore the pre-Chinese antecedents of these paintings, fragments of which survive from the Uygur Era of Manichaean history (755/762 – ca. 1024 CE), preserved today in the Asian Art Museum of Berlin.

Zsuzsanna Gulácsi is professor of art history, Asian studies, and comparative religious studies at Northern Arizona University. She is a historian of religious art, specializing in the contextualized art historical study of pan-Asiatic religions that adapted their arts to a variety of cultures as they spread throughout the continent. Her research has been supported by the National Humanities Center, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Scholarship, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and most recently the Getty Foundation (2019).