Youn-mi Kim: "Power of Miniature: Virtual Pilgrimage and Virtual Cosmos in Liao Architecture (907–1125)"

Abstract:

In the eleventh century, the Liao empire’s Buddhist practitioners in northeast China created a new architectural design that adorned the exterior of a pagoda (a multi-story monument enshrining Buddhist relics) with reliefs of miniature pagodas—a rather peculiar way to embellish a building. This talk charts a journey to traverse the multilayered visual and ritual program of those Liao pagodas adorned with miniatures. Such miniatures were designed to transform a Liao pagoda into a microcosm of Buddhist sacred geography, allowing Buddhist practitioners to perform a virtual pilgrimage to the Buddha’s far away homeland. Eventually, these miniature pagodas attached to a Liao brick pagoda create a vision of a three-dimensional mise en abymethat embodies the vision of Buddhist cosmology as developed in the Chinese Huayan tradition. In this Buddhist cosmology, the cosmos is seen as infinitely layered, and each being within is interconnected and interdependent. The cosmic vision created by the interplay between the miniature replica and the original erases the boundary between the exterior and the interior spaces, and silently preaches to the viewer regarding the essence of the Buddhist teaching about non-duality and emptiness. What mattered in these Liao pagodas was not the physicality of the architectural space, but the vision of virtual space.

Bio:

Professor Youn-mi Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. She is a specialist in Chinese Buddhist art with particular interest in symbolic rituals, in which an architectural space serves as a non-human agent; the interplay between visibility and invisibility in Buddhist art; and the sacred spaces and religious macrocosms created by religious architecture for imaginary pilgrimages. Her current book project is titled "Art, Space, and Ritual in Medieval Buddhism: From a Liao Pagoda to Heian Japanese Esoteric Ritual."