Constellations: HAA 2602 Special Topics Asian - China/Japan Silk Road

Karen Gerhart and Katheryn Linduff

This course focuses on the visual arts that were seen, traded, and produced along the Silk Road, that vast network of paths that connected goods, peoples and ideas from East Asia (including China, Japan and Korea) with Eurasia, West Asia and eastern Europe. Recent excavations as well as studies of materials from these trade routes have located all sorts of artifacts and material evidence dating from at least as early as the fourth millennium BCE. We can now document contact among the peoples from this early period through the 8th century. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Jainism, and a great many other religions along with Buddhism and Daoism were practiced in various locations for thousands of years and affected the arts, as did the political and economic aspirations of their patrons. The goal of this course is to understand cultural interaction and exchange, to develop skills in critical reading, writing, and thinking, and to explore visual cultures that developed in a rich context of the Silk Road.