This dissertation is an art historical analysis of a set of objects related to a ritual corpus of Tibetan Buddhism known as the Kālacakra tantra. Objects are tracked according to distinct socio-cultural conditions, each of which developed into differing interests regarding the Kālacakra tantra, interests distinct from the purposive and functional norms of Tantric Buddhism itself. The dissertation thus attempts a somewhat different methodology from other historical narratives regarding Buddhist art by moving beyond iconographic interpretation to analysis of how a common iconographical matrix is serially adapted into divergent forms and functions across distinct social formations in time and space. Field research and embodied analysis are prioritized.

Individual chapters attempt to isolate individuals and social formations for focused analysis. The introduction covers some background by focusing on the earlier, established dissemination of the Kālacakra tantra during and immediately after Yuan dynasty patronage of the tantra following the thirteenth century. This patronage was borne out by art from the Sa-skya sect of Tibetan Buddhism, in which Kālacakra imagery was subsumed into standardized ritual practices. This chapter also introduces common themes linking the subsequent parts of the dissertation, such as the sacrality and iconic presence common to works of Buddhist art. The second chapter focuses on how the seventeenth century Ganden Phodrang of the Geluk sect in central Tibet attempted to standardize Kālacakra imagery. A guidebook produced by the regime was an assertion of secular control bound to the the position of regent. The third chapter discusses the invention of a Kālacakra Hall for the Qing imperial capital in Beijing, and how the this hall reflected the multi-ethnic and identity-based values that the Qing court used to assert its power through the hall. The fourth chapter discusses the eighteenth century development of Labrang Monastery and its Kālacakra Hall. The large, relatively autonomous Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Amdo, in a region in halfway between central Tibet and the Qing capital Beijing, defined its hall in terms of its local population. A brief conclusion reconsiders the totality of works.

The Song dynasty (960-1279) and its northern neighbors of the "conquest dynasties" witnessed the circulation of new knowledge and techniques in divination and the astral sciences, and the widespread worship of astral deities. These elements cohered within the cult of the Tejaprabhā Buddha, controller of the visible heavens. This dissertation examines how this cult transformed Chinese and Inner Asian visual culture. The corpus of materials it addresses, in particular from the Inner Asian kingdom of the Tangut Xixia (1038-1227), sheds new light on cultural development and interaction across Eurasia. In vivid detail, the paintings, sculptures, prints, and decorated grottoes reveal complex processes of reception, appropriation, translation, and world-making. They connect with a rich body of texts within the astral sciences, including Buddhist scriptures that are here studied closely. Examining not only the symbolic meaning of astral art but also its semiotic mechanisms, this dissertation demonstrates how the visible heavens as represented on earth came to constitute unique forms of visuality, and revisits foundational promises of art history as a modern discipline.

This dissertation traces the transnational praxes of contemporary Chinese artists Cai Guo-Qiang, Chen Zhen, and Huang Yong Ping. Initially trained in painting, these three artists reinvent Chinese metaphysics in France, Japan, and the United States through site-specific practice to transgress cultural and linguistic limitations brought on by identity politics characteristic of 1990s art. Rooted in a mid-1980s fascination with metaphysics, the three artists materialized ephemeral, idiosyncratic cosmologies in their respective sites of "spiritual exile" to contest reified identity. While contemporary Chinese art has been well studied in surveys that create taxonomies to map out artist groups and movements, I suggest that closer analyses of these individual cosmologies, projected through particular biographies and iconographies, are necessary to nuance studies of Chinese contemporary artists, who are too often portrayed as politically driven to play the Chinese card and inflate their success in the global art market.

Departing from narratives of activism highlighted in previous scholarship, I take up issues of metaphysics historians of Chinese art tend to underplay for fear of reinforcing orientalist attitudes that plagued the initial reception of Chinese contemporary art. I argue that placing their cosmologies in focused historiographies of contemporary art and science reveals the artistic agency exercised by Chinese artists to achieve parity as individual artists on a global scale. Cai, Chen, and Huang aimed to rewrite the teleology of canonical art histories through praxes that embrace energetic languages and non-linear time.

My study sheds light on a cultural trend that attempted to scientize paranormal phenomena as a means to reconcile art, science, and spirituality toward the end of the Cold War. Doing so remedies the imprecise connections previous scholars drew between Chinese contemporary art and pre-modern Chinese art, histories, and metaphysics that falsely privilege a sinological entry into this body of work. Instead, I suggest that these cosmologies are constructs of contemporaneity, practical strategies devised to spark creativity in contemporary situations rather than wholesale, uncritical deployments of ancient metaphysics.

Part I of the dissertation, Earth, introduces a synchronic analysis of the intellectual milieu of the mid-1980s in China and Europe. It situates Chinese contemporary art in an intersection of primitivist "root-seeking" cultural movements and a popular somatic therapeutic qigong fever marking 1980s China to trace the sources of metaphysics informing these artistic systems. This revival of metaphysics in China coincides with utopian efforts in Europe to mitigate the failures of capitalism through artistic and spiritual practice that culminated in the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in Paris, setting stage for a global reception of metaphysical themes deployed by Chinese contemporary artists. Part II, Water, traces Huang Yong Ping's deployment of anti-metaphysical, anti-utopian stances through paradoxical implementations of Chinese metaphysics in France in order to construct a formal language of time and teleology as intervention. Part III, Fire, examines the way technology and art in Japan shaped Cai Guo-Qiang's position as an "artist of the East" who shifts the discourse of art from the global to the cosmological through volatile, time-based sculptures. Part IV, Air, unravels the microcosms and macrocosms of the human body and social metabolism Chen Zhen generated from the therapeutic efficacies of Eastern and Western medicine.

Although each part of the dissertation forms its own autonomous cosmology, together, they cohere into a larger narrative of how contemporary expatriate artists negotiate their praxes in a globalized art system to dispel rather than reinforce orientalist readings under the aegis of the Beuysian "artist-as-shaman" thesis.

This dissertation closely examines the art and craft workshops at the French-Jesuit-run orphanage of Tushanwan in the first decades of the twentieth-century. Founded in the 1860s, the workshops taught Chinese orphaned boys a wide range of vocational skills from painting to shoemaking in preparation for their entry into adulthood in a rapidly modernizing China. Using different art objects and projects created at the major workshops as my primary subjects of investigation, the dissertation analyzes the transmission, translation, and reinvention of modern Euro-American aesthetic ideologies and techniques at Tushanwan and their receptions. In the process, I question the nature and motivation of commercial workshops like Tushanwan beyond the monetary and reframe its practices and operations in terms of the religious, institutional, cultural, and historical legacies of the Jesuits in China. I also expand the global scope of popular late-nineteenth-century European aesthetic movements such as the Arts and Crafts by accounting for the reinterpretation of those ideologies within the local context. Through the works and practices from the workshops, I describe a collage of interactions between China and the world united by a sense of common spiritual identity that supposedly transcended national and state boundaries, but instead reified and maintained the heterogeneity of identities.

This dissertation examines the multiple contexts in which the ruins of the Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness) imperial garden-palace of the multiethnic Qing dynasty (1644–1912) are reconstituted through acts of copying. I consider the Yuanming Yuan as a site that has always been in cross-cultural translation, not only in its construction—its most famous section was designed in Sino-Baroque style by Jesuit court artists—but also in its destruction, when Anglo-French troops looted and burned it during the Second Opium War in 1860, leaving behind the marble ruins of the Sino-Baroque European Palaces. The dissertation shifts away from the original site in Beijing towards the garden’s reinterpretation and reconstitution in alternate spatial contexts from the early twentieth century to the present day. Because these reproductions are not exact copies, I consider them “translations,” in that they translate the Yuanming Yuan into new spatial contexts of international diplomacy, domestic theme park, museum gallery, and digital space; furthermore, by reconstituting a Qing imperial space that was looted and burned during the Opium Wars, these “translations” also serve as a means to reproduce—and challenge—national identities, cultural heritage, and appropriations of the past.

The introduction establishes the Yuanming Yuan as a site of cross-cultural translation, a site of memory, and a site of fragmentation. Chapter one examines the architectural translation of the Haiyantang (Hall of Calm Seas) in the European Palaces (Xiyanglou) section of the Yuanming Yuan. In the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, Empress Dowager Cixi reconstructed a new Haiyantang in the Central Lake area of Beijing; I argue that the appropriation of the Yuanming Yuan’s European Palace-style served to create a mediated space for renewed Qing diplomacy with international powers. Chapter two turns to the reconstruction of the Yuanming Yuan as theme parks in Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Hengdian and examines the parks’ strategies of selective reproduction and conflation of Qing imperial spaces. I argue that the microcosmic nature of the original Yuanming Yuan made it a suitable site to replicate within theme park imaginaries of the national future. Chapter three traces the journey of the looted bronze zodiac animal heads from the Haiyantang and argues that their potency as symbols of Yuanming Yuan’s looted objects comes from their physical form as decapitated heads. I further argue that the reinterpretation of the heads through acts of artistic creation and vandalism by contemporary artists and activists speak to present day concerns about cultural heritage, preservation practice, and national identities. The dissertation concludes with a meditation on the possibilities and limitations of digital reconstruction and preservation.

This dissertation examines ornamental writing on bronze vessels, ceramic eave tiles, and silk textiles dated from the Spring and Autumn period (ca. 771-476 BCE) to the end of the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 CE). These inscriptions--cast, inscribed, incised, or woven for display--provide an analytically rich site for providing a theory of writing because part of, if not all, of their identity is defined by an artisan's deliberate occlusion of their readability. I use a two-part method to study these scripts. The first approach attends to the recursive and replicatory design process of artisanal practice through epigraphical studies of extant characters and analyses of technological limitations and developments during the period in which these objects were produced. The second path explores how ornamental writing visually elaborates and conveys information. While the initial step addresses design and material technology, this line of inquiry provokes its audience in asking, "What do we see?" and "What do we read?" when confronted with ornamental script at various stages of its production. Research into excavation sites, workshop practices, and artisanal literacy informs my reconstruction of the conditions under which these inscriptions were seen.

Art workers dispatched by the state to Central Tibet in the 1960s to the 1970s approached image- making and their task of envisioning and rendering a socialist utopian future in their own ways, despite increasingly strict state prescriptions and encouragement to follow formulaic frameworks. This dissertation delves into three instances of PRC art workers traveling to Central Tibet for the purpose of creating propagandistic works that portray ethnic Tibetan people. While the mediums of visual representation—painting, film, and sculpture—are varied, the common threads expanding and compressing the limits of representation run throughout the case studies. Ethnic representation and the formation of subjectivities, image-making as a collective process, and claims of authenticity negotiate with and against each other in an effort to construct an easily legible visual rhetoric for the intended audience; namely, the common masses. Overall, the dissertation argues that the tensions within visual representations of ethnic Tibetan people expose the inherent contradiction of the envisioned socialist collective. The socialist utopian vision contrives to construct a cohesive, singular collective as the main agent to bend history and the natural world to its will, however women and non-Han ethnic people are placed in special categories with strict definitions that prevent them from melding into the collective.

Tensions and contradictions run through the seemingly superficial and one-dimensional propagandistic works portraying ethnic Tibetan people. While state prescriptions push towards a flattening out of forms and a reliance on circumscribed silhouettes, individual artistic styles and techniques push against the lure of the flattened surface. Dong Xiwen, Wu Guanzhong, and Shao Jingkun, in their paintings produced on a trip to Tibet in 1961, attempt to cleave a place for their own representational approaches. In the 1963 film Serf, filmmakers relied heavily upon subjective shots to induce sympathy from the inland audience for the downtrodden ethnic Tibetan serf. However, jarring moments of silenced and stilled tableau, as well as the obsessive concentration on Tibetan naked skin brings the audience members back towards the cinematic surface and guide them to consume the ethnic Tibetan bodies as objects. Instructions on how exactly to view representational images also play a major role in the supplemental materials surrounding all three projects, but most blatantly within the visual and textual materials for Wrath of the Serfs. While the materiality of the sculptural installation, Wrath of the Serfs, renders it immobile, reproduced exhibition photographs allow the three-dimensional figures to be manipulated as one-dimensional figures.Repeatedly, the lure of the representational surface attempts to supersede individual marks, styles, and techniques so that a standardized set of iconographic markers can be arrived upon for minimum ambiguity and maximum legibility. The illusion of representational authenticity is achieved through a collapsing of ethnic Tibetan people with disfigurement. Concentration on past traumas not only justifies the PRC presence in Central Tibet, but also insinuates a one- dimensionality to the definition of ethnic Tibetans forever locking them into the role of helpless people in need of rescue. Such authenticated representations, in a circular move, help to authenticate the art workers’ own socialist transformation. The rhetoric of shenru shenghuo (‘plunging into the thick of life), laodong (manual labor), and jiehe (combining with others) provide a framework through which artists could authenticate and articulate their allegiance to the collective. Within such rhetorical devices the process of collective image-making encouraged the sublimation of individual marks. Moreover, collective works and the recording of the audience’s reaction to them creates a ritual framework through which individual actors bodied forth or performed the idealized socialist vision of the collective.

The sacred mountain range of Wutai Shan (known in Tibetan as Riwo Tsegna) on the northern frontier of China offers a unique site for examining the religious culture of the Qing empire. Not only did it become one of the most important pilgrimage sites for Tibetans and Mongolians, it is also the location where Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist cosmographies converged. While surviving texts and images of Wutai Shan from medieval China have attracted considerable scholarly attention, artistic and literary representations of the mountain range in the later periods have rarely been studied. Drawing on a panoply of textual, pictorial, and architectural sources from Qing dynasty (1644-1912) onward, this dissertation explores the shifting dynamics of this holy site as a geographical, visual, and visionary destination in Tibetan Buddhism. Primary objects of my analysis include pilgrims' maps, mural programs that include Wutai Shan, praise poems, travel narratives and guidebooks, as well as sculptural and architectural replicas of the mountain range by Tibetan Buddhists in Tibet, Mongolia, the Manchu court in Beijing, and at Wutai Shan itself.

Each chapter coheres around individual(s) responsible for producing knowledge about Wutai Shan. Taken together, these case studies reveal the building blocks of Wutai Shan's visionary landscape: the discourse of visionary encounters, memories of previous masters, rituals, travel, and cosmography. I show that representations of these seemingly ephemeral or intangible histories, concepts, and experiences constitute the core of the mountain's religious identity, defining the ways Wutai Shan came to be viewed in the Tibetan Buddhist world with a potency and persistence that outstrips its physical topography and material structure or holdings. I argue that these ideas and visions of the mountain range significantly reconfigured sacred cosmography and political identities of the Qing empire and beyond.

This dissertation is a history of an Indian Buddhist biographical collection--the Wish-Fulfilling Vine--in the cultural imagination and discourse of Tibet during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Wish-Fulfilling Vine of Bodhisattva Avadanas (Skt. Bodhisattvavadanakalpalata, Tb. Byang chub sems dpa'i rtogs pa brjod pa dpag bsam gyi 'khri shing) by Kshemendra is an eleventh-century Sanskrit anthology of stories about the previous existences of the Buddha and his disciples, along with events from the Buddha's final life. Translated into Tibetan and incorporated into the Tibetan Buddhist canon, by the seventeenth century the Vine occupied a place of high prestige in Tibet. I argue that adaptations of the Vine--condensed literary digests, paintings, and woodcuts--constitute sophisticated forms of commentary that reveal the ingenuity and concerns of their producers. In addition to didactic and iconic functions in Buddhist practice, cultural productions of the Vine served as sites of discourse about knowledge, authority, ideal Buddhist exemplars, and authentic Indic origins. With prominent monastic intellectuals and rulers as producers and patrons of its editions and adaptations, the Vine offers perspectives into the elite culture of Tibet, in its monastic and courtly aspects.

Each chapter is organized around a prominent figure who designed, sponsored, or otherwise promoted cultural productions of the Wish-Fulfilling Vine. In Chapter One I trace how the Fifth Dalai Lama and his court popularized the Vine through public instruction, paintings, and literary activities. These conspicuously cultured displays promoted renewed interest in Sanskrit and the Indic origins of Buddhism, while contributing to broader projects of knowledge production and state-building. In Chapter Two I demonstrate how the lay Pho lha dynasty appropriated the Vine, sponsoring two large-scale multimedia productions while developing models for lay kingship and patronage. In Chapter Three I argue that Si tu Pan chen, an influential monk of Sde dge in eastern Tibet, articulated his vision of the ideal monastic through the design of Vine paintings and other literary and visual productions on the Buddha's life. In Chapter Four I study Zhu chen, court chaplain of Sde dge, and his work on the Vine as commentaries on cultural production.