Event

Open to the public, advanced registration required. Registration closes on May 15th.

The physical form a book takes as a vessel for knowledge preservation and transmission varies considerably across cultures and historical periods. In early South Asia, a unique format of a book, here designated as “pothi” using a Hindi term, developed, which cleverly harnessed local environmental conditions and materials. This Indic book form creatively utilized leaves and barks of indigenous trees of the sub-continent, which determined its distinct shape: a pothi is a horizontally long and narrow rectangular book made of uniformly sized but unbound folios that are flipped horizontally.  This locally specific, materially determined form of a book traveled far and wide in the hands of itinerant pilgrims, merchants, and spiritual masters, especially as Esoteric Buddhism spread around Asia.

 This lecture explores the mobility of pothi-format books from Buddhist South Asia and their circulation and impact as sacred objects beyond the Himalayas through a few case studies. Certain pothi-format Sanskrit Buddhist books from medieval India bear physical traces of their transregional journeys and subsequent veneration and use by Buddhist communities elsewhere. Of particular importance is how the pothi format itself became a powerful symbol of spiritual authenticity beyond South Asia. As Esoteric Buddhism moved across cultural boundaries, the distinctive material form of the pothi evoked legitimacy and authority, even when the language underwent translation, and their medium shifted from palm leaf to paper.  The analytical focus on a book’s format and materiality help challenge the unidirectionality of influences often assumed in the history of Esoteric Buddhism.  For example, an early fifteenth-century xylograph copy of a compendium of Esoteric Buddhist vision texts made in Hangzhou (Southeastern China) for a Tibetan Buddhist master — featuring Newar stylistic elements –traveled to Bhaktapur, Nepal where it inspired the transformation of this Chinese-made concertina book into a pothi format Nepalese manuscript in the seventeenth century. This remarkable journey illustrates the multi-directional flows in the development of the Buddhist book art, which was catalyzed by the pothi as a mobile sacred object. 

Distinguished Speaker Biography

Professor Kim’s research and teaching interests cover a broad range of topics with special interests in intertextuality of text-image relationship, art and politics, female representations and patronage, issues regarding re-appropriation of sacred objects, and post-colonial discourse in the field of South and Southeast Asian Art. From her childhood exposure to Buddhist art in Korea and a year-long stay in India as well as numerous research trips to various parts of South and Southeast Asia, she has long been interested in the materiality of sacred objects, especially that of paintings and texts. Her passion for learning languages and new scripts has been instrumental in pursuing an interdisciplinary research on illustrated Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts and Esoteric Buddhist iconography. Understanding people behind an object is one of her main research goals as an art historian.

Her first book, Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist book cult in South Asia (University of California Press, 2013) examines illustrated Buddhist manuscripts as sacred objects of medieval cultic innovation that can be animated through the presence of images and various design strategies. Her second monograph, Garland of Visions: Color, Tantra and a Material History of Indian painting ( University of California Press, 2021) studies the generative relationship between artistic intelligence and tantric visionary practices in the construction and circulation of visual knowledge in medieval South Asia, by taking color as a primary vector of investigation and by focusing on Indic manuscript painting of the period between 1000-1500 CE. 

Her on-going research projects concern three main areas: materiality in Indian painting, representation of donors and ritual scenes, and cross-cultural exchanges across Buddhist Asia. Her third monograph in progress, tentatively titled “Paper, Pothi and the Goddess: History of Devi manuscripts and gender in the art of the book in South Asia” explores peculiar preponderance of Goddess manuscripts in the corpus of painted manuscripts in medieval South Asia, focusing on gendered aspects of artistic production and ritual practices. Two additional research projects are currently underway, one on “visual vernaculars” in South Asia as they developed during the second millennia, and the other on “living monuments” in South and Southeast Asia. 

In addition to her academic research, she directs a digital humanities project on color and pigments in painting, ” Mapping Color in History,” which will serve as a knowledge common for conservation specialists as well as anyone interested in material aspects of color, with a searchable, open database for historical research on pigments. She co-curated an NEH-funded exhibition on Nepalese Buddhist ritual art held at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery (College of the Holy Cross) in Fall, 2019 (Sep 4 -Dec 14, 2019; dharmapunya2019.org). The exhibition catalog, Dharma and Puṇya: Buddhist ritual art of Nepal, which she co-edited with Professor Todd Lewis (College of the Holy Cross) was published by Hotei (Brill imprint) in Fall 2019.