Bringing to Life the Art of Ancient China

Pitt’s Anthony Barbieri-Low is taking on art history tradition through his research on the artisans who created Qin and Han dynasty masterpieces

Images from Anthony Barbieri-Low’s Web-based animated virtual reality tour of the Wu Family Shrines, one of the most important cultural monuments of early China.

Many people encountering the surviving works of ancient Chinese artisans—an earthenware horse sculpture with a defiant gaze and flaring nostrils, say, or mythical images carved into the limestone blocks of funerary shrines—see only sinuous lines, rich textures, and exquisite detailing.

Pitt’s Anthony Barbieri-Low sees those things, too. But he also sees evidence of class and educational distinctions among artisans. Of an assembly-line process that predated Henry Ford’s by two millennia. And of involuntary contributions by convict- and slave-laborers.

Barbieri-Low, an assistant professor of early Chinese history who joined Pitt’s faculty in 2001, specializes in Chinese material and visual culture from the Qin (221–206 B.C.E.) and Han (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) dynasties, a period that offers countless works of enduring art and artifacts for study. But while the aesthetics of that period—and the tastes, customs, and rituals of the imperial elites who commissioned the art—certainly get his attention, this up-and-coming scholar has pushed beyond what he would consider to be traditional scholarship of the period.

Barbieri-Low has made it his mission to bring ancient Chinese art to life from a perspective that, until recently, had been largely ignored: that of the artisans who actually produced those ancient masterpieces.

“Many people say, ‘This is a pretty design’ when they study the art,” Barbieri-Low comments. “My work, hopefully, will help to reorient the early Chinese art history field as we look at art as a creation of the artist. It puts it back into context. Nobody else is doing this kind of stuff in the field. I’m looking forward to creating a ‘mini-stir’ in the [art history] field as I steer away from the art itself.”

A “tradition-baiting” exhibition

That “mini-stir” already has begun, thanks to an art exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum titled “Recarving China’s Past: Art, Architecture, and Archaeology of the ‘Wu Family Shrines.’” Barbieri-Low joined colleagues from the museum and the University of California, Berkeley, to create the exhibition, which is on view through June 26. Among the exhibition’s sponsors is Pitt’s Asian Studies Center.

The Wu family shrines, created in the second century C.E., are described by the museum as being one of the most important cultural monuments of early China. The shrines, located at what is known as the Wuzhai Shan site in Jiaxiang County, Shandong Province, include some 50 stone slabs with intricate carvings and engravings depicting emperors and kings, heroic women, and mythological subjects.

In a review of the exhibition in the May 4 New York Times, writer Holland Cotter described the show as “an assiduous, tradition-baiting mapping out of the many hard questions that such a project would have to ask. And those questions ultimately boil down to one: Is the antique monument known as the Wu family shrines a reality, however abraded by time, or a fiction, created and elaborated over centuries?”

According to the museum, the shrines constitute “some of the most valuable and authentic materials for the study of Chinese antiquity” and “are fundamental to understanding historical approaches to and methods of studying Chinese art and history.”

In addition to creating the exhibition itself, Barbieri-Low and his collaborators also published, with help from a host of other contributing writers, a coffee table-size exhibition catalog that is being sold through the museum. Barbieri-Low contributed to that work through his research on the artisans who produced the stone carvings and other funerary art.

Perhaps Barbieri-Low’s greatest contribution to the exhibition, though, was the way he brought to life the cemetery site through his development of a Web-based animated virtual-reality tour. Using 3D modeling software and published measurements, photographs, and personal observations, he reconstructed the site in a way that allows users to view many of the monuments from different angles and distances, even offering close-up looks at the textured stone carvings. Viewers can click onto many of the carvings for detailed descriptions of the stories being told in the pictures.

“It’s really a teaching tool,” Barbieri-Low says of the interactive computer tour. “I knew it would be a good teaching tool because educators always use that site. It’s important just for the visual importance of Chinese art.”

To access the site, visit www.pitt.edu/~ablow/Research/ComputerRecon.html.

Humanizing the art

Despite his time-consuming efforts in the Princeton museum collaboration, the 37-year-old Barbieri-Low found time recently to complete a book-length manuscript titled “Artisans in Early Imperial China.” Barbieri-Low says he is negotiating with a major university press to publish the work, which his Web site calls a “contextualized social history” of artisans during China’s Qin and Han dynasties. “One cannot truly appreciate the so-called art objects of early China without understanding something about the men and women who made them and under what social circumstances they worked,” he says.

“Understanding these lives and the complex social, commercial, and technological networks they created will allow us to humanize the material remains of the past,” he continues. “How did these persons live? How were they trained? What health hazards did they face? Who were their patron gods? How did they market their products? How free were they?” These are the questions that Barbieri-Low’s study attempts to answer for the first time.

Of particular interest to him was the structure of early Chinese artisan workshops, which he says looked a lot like modern industrial mass-production facilities. Marketing techniques during the Qin and Han dynasties included the use of family trademarks (and resultant trademark infringements), rhyming jingles, and mass-produced knock-offs of imperial products. Barbieri-Low also examines workplace hazards and diseases, economic geography, and the “most abject classes” of artisans: conscripts, convicts, and slaves.

“I want people to take a more comprehensive view of early Chinese art,” Barbieri-Low says. “If the object, for instance, was made by a convict, how would I look at it differently? That actually should increase the interest in the objects.”

An affinity for Chinese culture

Barbieri-Low, a San Francisco Bay-area native, began his college studies at San Jose State University as a mathematics and computer science major—reflecting, in part, the influences of his engineer father and biologist mother. But in his junior year, finding that math lacked a humanistic element that he missed, Barbieri-Low switched his major to Asian history and transferred to the University of California, Santa Cruz. He attributes his choice to study early Chinese history partly to his exposure to Chinese culture while growing up on the West Coast.

Barbieri-Low went on to become fluent in Mandarin Chinese and to earn a B.A. in history with an Asian concentration, in 1994. He then earned his M.A. in East Asian Regional Studies at Harvard University in 1997 and his Ph.D. in Chinese Art and Archaeology at Prince-ton University in 2001. His dissertation was titled “The Organization of Imperial Workshops during the Han Dynasty.”

Next, Barbieri-Low was recruited to Pitt, where his scholarly career already has begun to flourish. So has his teaching career, according to Katherine Carlitz, assistant director for academic affairs in Pitt’s Asian Studies Center, who helps faculty members like Barbieri-Low write grant proposals and organize conferences.

“He teaches very imaginatively, using everything from historical texts to video games,” Carlitz says. “He teaches an 8 a.m. course, and people still sign up and come. His classes fill up.”

Barbieri-Low also is developing a new course through which he will teach students to create their own interactive virtual-reality tours of excavated ancient sites. He also has two more books in the works, one a literary anthology of travel accounts of explorers to China, the other a history of cultural transmission.

“It’s such a fascinating field,” he says of the study of ancient Chinese culture. “There’s so much being discovered. It’s like the Dead Sea Scrolls being discovered every year over there. I can’t even keep up with it. There’s never a dull moment.” • Daniel Bates