Associate Professor of Art History Stephen J. Goldberg presented a paper on June 23 during the Association for Asian Studies-in-Asia Conference at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.
His paper, “Narrativity Without Narrative: Topoi and the Prefiguration of Visual Narrativity in Chinese Pictorial Art,” was presented as part of a panel on “Degrees of Narrativity in Chinese and Japanese Visual Tradition.” Goldberg focused on the prevalence of “narrativity” in the vast majority of traditional Chinese paintings that cannot be classified as narrative works of art.
He examined the workings of topoi (common places) – the settings in which a scene is depicted, such as the tingyuan (scholar’s garden), and the important roles they play in prefiguring a reading of the character, identity, and gender relations of their inhabitants.
