Join us for this special 2nd annual lecture and festive reception in celebration of Chinese New Year. In honor of the Year of the Ram, Dr. Jerome Silbergeld will lecture about this animal’s role in Chinese art and history.

Art and Chinese New Year

Join us for this special 2nd annual lecture and festive reception in celebration of Chinese New Year. In honor of the Year of the Ram, Dr. Jerome Silbergeld will lecture about this animal’s role in Chinese art and history.

The Chinese twelve calendrical animals system 生肖dates back at least to the Qin dynasty, complemented by the twenty-eight figures of the lunar “mansions” in Chinese astrology 二十八星宿and the four directional animals 四神. This year’s animal, the yang 羊, is unique among the twelve in being not one animal but two: the sheep and the goat, two animals that could hardly be more different from each other. This presentation will look at the calendrical system, particularly the two yang and the various roles that they have placed in Chinese cultural and historical lore.

This event will be followed by a reception with typical Chinese New Year fare of dumplings, rice cakes, and other light refreshments.

Jerome Silbergeld is the P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor of Chinese Art History at Princeton University and director of Princeton’s Tang Center for East Asian Art. He was previously the chair of Art History and director of the School of Art at the University of Washington. He teaches, publishes, and curates exhibitions on topics in traditional and contemporary Chinese painting, architecture and gardens, cinema and photography. He has published more than seventy books, articles, and book chapters, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Chinese art. His most next publication will be an edited volume, The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture (University of Hawai’i Press, forthcoming 2015).

Friday, February 27, 2015 ~ 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Free for China Institute members / $15 for non-members

To register for this event, please contact Laura Warne at lwarne@chinainstitute.org or 212-744-8181, ext. 146.