Art Production, Consumption, and Collection in Ming-Qing Suzhou

Suzhou as a cultural site is the key to many broad and complicated issues regarding how art was produced and practiced in Ming-Qing China. These complexities include artistic regionalism and cosmopolitanism, the codification and edification of literati culture, the urbanization and commoditization of art, and the interrelationship of the global and the local. This seminar aims to examine Suzhou as the nexus that interweaves all of these essential threads of the Ming-Qing artworld and as the lens through which we understand this artworld as multi-faceted and multi-layered.