The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events

Thursday, 23 May 2024, 11:00
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg

Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University
FKH colloquium

Shunhua Jin
»Migrations and the Formation of Chinese Muslim Visual Culture: Pre-modern Mosques and Perso-Arabic Manuscripts in China«

Abstract
The history of Muslim migrations to China has shaped the character of Islamic material culture in China. As early as the 7th and 8th centuries, West Asian Muslim merchants came to China and established themselves in capital cities and coastal regions. With the Mongol expedition, Muslim soldiers, administrators, craftsmen, scientists, and merchants flooded into the entire land of China. Until the Ming dynasty (1368-1644 C.E.), it formed up the Chinese-speaking Muslim communities and cultures. Muslims built mosques in their neighborhoods with local materials, partly sharing the form with other local architecture. Persian and Arabic writings appeared on a variety of materials, including inscriptions found in coastal cities, mosque buildings, porcelains, and manuscripts.
This colloquium will examine the relationship between the forms of historical mosques and Muslim migrants to China in different periods, as well as the formation of Chinese Muslim visual culture, which integrated with local materials and visual expressions. The second part of the presentation examines several different styles of Arabic script written by Chinese Muslims and the influence of the brush and the wooden-block printing on these scripts. Furthermore, it examines the links between writing styles of several manuscripts found in the Xinjiang and Gansu regions. The distinctiveness of these Chinese Muslim codices demonstrates that the Chinese Muslims, who have formed from the immigrants historically, became the subject of migration.

The speaker
Shunhua Jin is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Archaeological Sciences in Goethe University, a fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, as well as an international fellow of the Johanna Quandt Young Academy at Goethe in 2024. She received her PhD in the Philosophy of Art from Fudan University, Shanghai, with a research subject on the aesthetic experience of domes in mosque architecture. From April until July 2024 she is at the invitation of Hagit Nol, Junior Professor of Islamic Archaeology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, a Fellow at Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. Her stay is supported by the project »Islamic Archaeology and Art History« (IAAH) funded by the VolkswagenStiftung and the Johanna Quandt Young Academy.

Participation
Closed event. Contact: Beate Sutterlüty; email: b.sutterluety@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de).