Shih-shan Susan Huang, Assistant Professor

Shih-shan Susan Huang received her PhD from Yale University and her MA and BA from National Taiwan University. Prior to joining Rice University in fall 2006, she taught at the University of Washington, Seattle, and was the Mellon Post-Doc Fellow at Columbia University. Dr. Huang was the recipient of Blanshard Prize, awarded for the outstanding dissertation submitted to the History of Art at Yale University.

Huang is interested in studying East Asian visual culture by applying interdisciplinary approaches that integrate art, religion, and history. Her recent research focuses on Daoist and Buddhist art in medieval China. Huang’s book-length project entitled Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Song China, 10th-13th Centuries, is supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Junior Scholar Grants in 2008-09. Huang explores the little-studied visual vocabulary of Daoism. She traces the tradition of the so-called “mental images” or “inner visions” discussed in medieval Daoist meditation and inner alchemical texts, and links the making of Daoist paintings and material culture to the context of internal and external ritual practices. The images that form the core of her book are the religious paintings, printed illustrations, ritual diagrams, talismans, and funeral artifacts produced or circulated in from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. The primary textual sources she consults with include arcane Daoist ritual and meditative texts, temple chronicles, local gazetteers from the medieval period, as well as contemporary ethnographies documenting Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. Art historians have rarely studied this body of visual and textual materials, partly because of their anonymous, repetitive nature, or lack of artistic quality. Although the images may not tell us much about the artistic achievement of an individual maker, their anonymity, uniformity, and longevity speak strongly of the cultural patterns and habits characteristic of Chinese religious visual culture.

Referee Articles

• "Tianzhu lingqian: Divination Prints from a Buddhist Temple in Song Hangzhou," Artibus Asiae 67.2 (2007): 243-296.
• "Summoning the Gods: Paintings of Three Officials of Heaven, Earth and Water and Their Association with Daoist Ritual Performance in the Southern Song Period (1127-1279)," Artibus Asiae 61.1 (2001): 5-52.

Edited Volume

• “Printed Matter, Painterly Imagery: Buddhist Illustrated Prints in Hangzhou, 10th-13th Centuries.” In Lucille Chia and Hilde de Weerdt eds., First Impressions (Brill, forthcoming) 

Other Article

• "Imagining Efficacy: The Common Ground between Buddhist and Daoist Pictorial Art in Song China," Orientations 36.3 (2005): 63-69.

Translation

• Valerie Hansen, “Zhongguoren shi reuh guiyi fojiao de: Tulufan muzang jieshi de xinyang gaibian” (How the Chinese Converted to Buddhism: What the Turfan Graves Reveal about Religious Change), Dunhuang tulufan yanjiu [Dunhuang and Turfan Studies] 4 (1999): 17-37.

PhD Dissertation

• “The Triptych of Taoist Deities of Heaven, Earth, and Water and the Making of Visual Culture in the Southern Song China (1127-1279)”

MA Thesis

• “The Murals of the Daoist Temple Yonglegong and the Workshop Practice in Southern Shanxi in the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368)” [in Chinese]

Courses Offered

• HART 372/ASIA 372 Chinese Art and Visual Culture
• HART 371/ASIA 371 Chinese Painting
• ASIA 211/ HART 211Asian Civilizations
• (seminar) Daoist Art
• (seminar) Medieval China and its Neighbors: Material Culture of the Song, Liao, Jin and Xi Xia

Office Location: Herring Hall 110

Office Hours for Fall 2009: Thursdays, 12 - 1 pm 

Office Phone: 713-348-4240