Date: Wednesday, 20 September 2017
Time: 18:30 – 20:00
Venue: Drake Gallery, 1/F Fung Ping Shan Building, University Museum and Art Gallery (UMAG) , HKU, 90 Bonham Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Speaker: Soren Edgren
Language: English
Co-organisers: UMAG, HKUL, Dept Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts
Cost: Free admission. All are welcome. Please click here to register.

By analogy with Western illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, Dr Edgren will introduce a genre of East Asian Buddhist manuscripts. Generally written with gold and silver ink on dark indigo-dyed paper, these Buddhist works feature drawn frontispiece illustrations. Dr Edgren will suggest that while the early adoption of printed Buddhist sutras with elaborate woodcut frontispieces stifled the growth of illuminated manuscripts in China, state support for Buddhism in Korea contributed to their rapid development, and a strong Buddhist culture and keen sense of illustrative design promoted their spread across Japan.

James Soren Edgren was Editorial Director of the Chinese Rare Books Project, an online international union catalogue of Chinese rare books based at Princeton University. Edgren received his Ph.D. in Sinology from the University of Stockholm and has worked as East Asian cataloguer and bibliographer in the Royal Library in Stockholm, as well as having been active in the antiquarian book trade. In addition to dozens of scholarly articles, he has written the Catalogue of the Nordenskiöld Collection of Japanese Books in the Royal Library, Chinese Rare Books in American Collections and served as Associate Editor for The Oxford Companion to the Book.

The HKU Preservation Lecture Series is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.