Ph.D. Student Yuzhu Wang Sheds Light on the Power of Landscape in Buddhist Art

Ph.D. student Yuzhu Wang represented Bryn Mawr at the Barnes Foundation's 30th Annual Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art. 

Located in downtown Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation attracts visitors and scholars alike to its world-renowned collections of impressionist, post-Impressionist, and modern art. Celebrating new scholarship and thoughtful exchange across generations of art historians, the Symposium brings together graduate students from across the mid-Atlantic to present current research in the field. Wang has attended this conference as an audience member since 2023, but this year, for the first time, she took the stage and shared her own work with the crowd.

At the edge of the Gobi Desert sit the Mogao Caves, a system of temples carved directly into the natural landscape that house some of the finest examples of Buddhist art. Wang's presentation titled "Visualizing the Cosmic Center: Artists and the Transformation of Mount Sumeru in the Medieval Dunhuang" builds on her master's thesis and situates the paintings in these caves into their physical and symbolic landscapes. 

In many mediums, landscape is studied as a secondary element — a decorative background more than anything, says Wang. But at religious sites such as the Mogao Caves, the specific landscape in which the paintings are situated informs both their artistic interpretation and the lived experience of viewing the art. 

Additionally, emphasis is placed on the paintings' religious overtones, assigning them power and taking it away from the artists who created them.

Wang's research turns the typical sequence of understanding religious art on its head and, in turn, gives agency back to the artist who created it many centuries ago.

"There is a clear sequence: the artist created something first, and the religious interpretation followed that," she says. "The artists take the lead."

As she continues her academic career and delves deeper into her research, it is this relationship that has encouraged Wang to move farther and farther away from the pure religious context of Buddhist art and towards recontextualizing artworks within their landscapes, both physical and symbolic.

In fact, it was thanks to Bryn Mawr courses that she had the idea of studying landscape and power in association with Buddhist art. It was in a course with Associate Professor of History of Art Professor Jie Shi where the idea of studying landscape came to the foreground of Wang's mind. The complexities of landscape in art and the power dynamics that inform them are discussed in American art, but less so in East Asian art, and the discussion of these relationships in Shi's class acted as inspiration for Wang's work.

Wang was a teaching assistant for Associate Professor of History of Art C.C. McKee's class, “Landscape, Art, and Racial Ecologies,” while writing and revising her thesis last year. Assisting with that course also shaped her thinking, especially by prompting her to attend more closely to questions of power in her project.

Shi, who was Wang's M.A. thesis advisor and whom she credits as a great mentor, introduced her at the Symposium and emphasized her passion and eagerness to learn.