Heather Clydesdale - Summer on the Silk Roads
Heather Clydesdale’s article, “Rethinking China’s Frontier: Archaeological Finds Show the Hexi Corridor’s Rapid Emergence as a Regional Power,” was published in late June in the online journal Humanities. She was invited to submit it as part of a special series, “Further Explorations Along the Silk Roads.”
In July, Heather travelled to India to represent the department of Art and Art History at the Association-of-Asian Studies-in-Asia conference, held in New Delhi. Here, she presented a paper, “Power Through Narrative” on cross-cultural influences in painting seen in western China. While in India, she traveled with a group of scholars from the University of Hong Kong, Fudan University, the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, New York University and Columbia University to see sculpture and architecture in Delhi, Mathura, and Agra. She continued on by herself to Bhopal to see the Great Stupa at Sanchi, built from the third to first centuries BCE, and study the relationships between sculpture, architecture and ritual.
This trip supports her research on early Medieval Chinese art (which is strongly influenced by Indian Buddhist art), as well as her Culture and Ideas sequence, China on the Silk Roads.