“Trans-Himalayan
Transmissions: Sino-Sogdian Textile Heritage in Tibetan Areas”
By
Mariachiara Gasparini
Wednesday,
March 2, 2016 at 7:30 p.m.
In Knight
Building, 521 Memorial Way (behind Memorial Auditorium) in Room 102
Part of a larger study, this paper analyzes the
transmission of textile techniques and motifs comprised in the Sino-Sogdian
artistic repertoire through former Tibetan areas. It explores the later
development of early Islamic Central Asian textile production, and its
adaptation into Buddhist context.
A recognized Central Asian textile iconography
spread from the Tarim to The Mediterranean Basin. Not only was it reproduced at
the borders of great empires but was preserved and secularized in time by
nomadic and semi-nomadic people of Turko-Mongol origin.
A group of textiles held in the China National
Silk Museum, possibly from Qinghai, analyzed and catalogued during a long
period of research in Asia, will be presented. Still unpublished, some of these
textiles, which are comparable to wall-painted costumes along the Silk Road
network, have, indeed, provided evidence of a common fashion in vogue in
Trans-Himalayan areas before the rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth
century.
Mariachiara
Gasparini teaches Art of the Silk Road at Santa Clara University. She
received her Ph.D. in Transcultural Studies: Global Art History from the
University of Heidelberg in 2015. Her Master’s degree in East Asian Art
is from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London. Her publications include
“Woven Mythology. The Textile Encounter of Makara, Senmurv and Phoenixes”
in the anthology Global Textile Encounters: China, India, Europe (Oxford
and Philadelphia, 2014), “A Mathematic Expression of Art: Sino-Iranian
and Uighur Textiles Interactions and the Turfan Textile Collection in Berlin”
in Transcultural Studies Journal 1, 2014, and “The Silk Cover of the
Admonitions Scroll: Aesthetic and Visual Analysis” in Ming and Qing
Studies, 2013.
