Buddhist and Daoist Illustrated Prints in the Ming

Speaker: Susan Shih-shan Huang | 黃士珊, T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Transnational Asian Studies, Rice University

This talk examines the highly illustrated and widely circulated vernacular Buddhist and Daoist woodcuts of the Ming period. Taken together, these materials provide valuable firsthand evidence for the reception of religious print culture and illuminate the concerns of a broad lay audience. Longevity, healing, the torments of hell, and other household matters that preoccupied ordinary believers—including women—appear as recurring leitmotifs in these popular manuscripts and printed texts. In addition to visual features shared with other forms of late imperial visual culture, the colophons of these woodcuts offer important information about donors, sponsors, and makers, as well as the scale of mass production. They also reveal a geographic shift in the center of religious printing, from Song–Yuan Hangzhou to Ming Beijing.

Click the More Details button to RSVP or register now(opens in a new tab).

Shih-shan Susan Huang is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University. Her research focuses on the intersections of art, religion and transnational networks in Asia. Her first book, Picturing the True Form (Harvard Asia Center, 2012; Chinese translation, Zhejiang University Press, 2022), explores the visual culture of Daoism. Her recent monograph, The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture (Brill, 2024; paperback, 2025), winner of the Bei Shan Tang Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in 2026, traces the circulation of Buddhist texts and images across Asia and highlights their roles as dynamic, mobile artifacts. She also co-edited Visual and Material Cultures of Middle Period China (Brill, 2017) with Patricia Ebrey and collaborated with Stephen F. Teiser as guest editor of the special
issue “Ritual and Materiality in Buddhism and Asian Religions” in the Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies (2025). Huang is currently pursuing two new projects: one on the Ten Kings of Hell in Ming–Qing paintings and printed books, and another on Buddhist and Daoist imagery in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century European travel books.