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De-nin D Lee

Assistant Professor

 


Phone (207) 725-3678
Title Assistant Professor
Department ART
2nd Title Assistant Professor
2nd Department ASIAN STUDIES
Work Location 103 Visual Arts Center
E-Mail dlee@bowdoin.edu
 
De-nin Deanna Lee - Bowdoin Art History and Asian Studies

Current Research

Not Appropriate for a Scholar's Study: A Cultural Biography of "The Night Banquet of Han Xizai" book manuscript. for more »

Links

AsiaNetwork »
A consortium of some one hundred and fifty North American colleges striving to strengthen the role of Asian Studies within the framework of liberal arts education to help prepare a new generation of undergraduates for a world in which Asian societies are playing more and more prominent roles. Grants for faculty-student collaborative research in Asia and other opportunities for learning and teaching about Asia available.

Resources in Asian art »

Teaching

De-nin Lee (De-nin Lee) specializes in the history of Chinese art, particularly traditional Chinese ink painting. Her courses at Bowdoin College have included a broad introductory survey of art and architecture in Asia (Art History/Asian Studies 103), a course on art in twentieth-century China, and a seminar exploring the political uses of art by empires and dissidents in imperial and modern China.

Education

Stanford University, Ph.D., 2003
Williams College, M.A., 1995
University of California, Berkeley, B.A., 1992

Recent scholarly activity

Prof. Lee's article, Fragments for Constructing a History of Southern Tang Painting (937-976), in volume 34 of the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies discusses painters, the kinds of paintings they produced, and some aspects of painting (such as the relationship between painting and poetry and calligraphy) during the Southern Tang Dynasty, a small and short-lived but artistically influential kingdom in war-torn, tenth-century China.

Prof. Lee recently presented a paper, "Weaving Palindromes and Reciting Sutras," for the 2004 New York Conference on Asian Studies. That paper examines murals from the tenth-century tomb of an aristocratic woman in a Qidan cemetary excavated in Inner Mongolia. These exquisite murals, accompanied by poetic inscriptions in Chinese, pose baffling questions about the geographical extent of Han Chinese culture and whether and how the semi-nomadic Qidan appropriated the imagery and styles of their sedentary rivals.

In summer 2004, Prof. Lee participated in the Third International Seminar on the Study of Dunhuang Art and Society at sites near the so-called Silk Road in western China (www.silk-road.com/toc/). She is studying Buddhist cave murals that date from the fourth to the fourteenth century and gathering materials for a future course on Buddhist art in Asia.

With support from Educational Research and Development, Prof. Lee is developing for use in Art History/Asian Studies 013, "Stories and Scrolls", a website featuring Spring Festival on the River, a twelfth-century Chinese handscroll painting attributed to the painter Zhang Zeduan. Once completed, the site will allow students to upload their own colophons (textual responses that traditionally were appended to handscrolls) virtually to the digitized painting.

Curriculum vitae in PDF formPDF »


Image Credits:
Professor Lee in front of what's affectionately known as the Silver Pavilion in Kyoto. For more about this pavilion and its surrounding garden, select Ginkaku-ji from The Japanese Garden website.

top: Zhao Gan, "Along the River at First Snow," detail. National Palace Museum collection. (Source: "Zhao Gan", Wuhan: Hubei meishu, 2000, n.p.)

middle: Baoshan Tomb 2, North mural, detail.

bottom: Zhang Zeduan, attrib., "Spring Festival on the River," detail. Palace Museum, Beijing. (Source: "Zhang Zeduan hui Qingming shanghe tu," Beijing: Rongbaozhai, 1997, cover illustration)