Pre/Early Modern Forum: Yong Cho (UC Riverside)

The Pre/Early Modern Forum is delighted to announce the upcoming ZOOM talk by Dr. Yong Cho, Assistant Professor of History of Art at University of California, Riverside. The talk will take place in Zoom (https://yale.zoom.us/j/8472619307) on November 28th (Monday), at 4pm EST.
Dr. Cho’s talk is titled “The Grid and the Buddha Body: Measurement, Cloth, and Embodiment,” an abstract of which is included below:
Focusing on a group of unusual paintings produced on checked cloths from Khara Khoto, this presentation reconstructs the history of how the grid emerged as a powerful visual tool for makers of Buddha icons in the twelfth-to-thirteenth-century Central Asia. On the one hand, the grid’s usefulness lay in its ability to effectively aid in the measurement and scaling of the Buddha image. On the other hand, the grid, by merging the image with its physical support that is the woven cloth, facilitated the making of a living Buddha icon that had an embodied presence in the real space.
Dr. Cho is specialist in the art and architecture of East and Central Asia from medieval and early modern periods. He focuses on the question of how artistic creativity emerges when people, objects, and ideas move or become displaced from the place of origin. His research interests cover a broad range of topics: theories of cross-cultural contact, multiculturalism and multilingualism in visual arts, the visual and material cultures of mobile societies, sacred objects and their relationship to ritual, the relationship between making and meaning, and the historiography of Silk Road art and archaeology.