East Asian Art History INSTITUTE HISTORY
Research and teaching on East Asian Art History began in 1947 at the Institute of Art History at Heidelberg University, as part of a comprehensive series of seminars on world art history. The establishment of East Asian Art History as a specialized subject in Germany is closely linked to the life's work of Dietrich Seckel (1910-2007), who, after returning from a ten-year stay in Japan, completed his habilitation in Heidelberg in 1948. The first chair for East Asian Art History was established for him in 1965. Until the establishment of the professorship at the Free University of Berlin (2003), Heidelberg was the only specialized research and teaching center for East Asian Art History in Germany.
After Dietrich Seckel passed away in 2007, the institute received nearly 1,000 photographs that Seckel himself had taken between 1936 and 1942, while teaching in Japan. They reveal part of his personal career and at the same time offer a unique view of Japan during the pre-war and wartime periods. (These photographs were digitized as part of a 2015 project and analyzed and classified in Anne-Laure Bodin's master's thesis, which can be found in the Heidelberg University’s library repository.)
Lothar Ledderose succeeded Seckel as the second chair in 1976. Under his leadership, the Institute experienced sustained growth. In addition to the steady expansion of the collection of a specialized library, the broadening of teaching activities (including regular visiting professorships for German and international experts), and the establishment of numerous international contacts, Ledderose also led the implementation of research projects and the publication of exhibition catalogs. In 2005, he established the "Buddhist Stone Sutras in China" research project at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. This internationally acclaimed project is a complete and systematic documentation of the stone inscriptions.
In 2004, the institute's scope of research and teaching was significantly expanded with the addition of a second professorship dedicated to Japanese art history (Melanie Trede, until 2023). In spring of 2005, Prof. Melanie Trede established an Ishibashi Visiting Professorship for Japanese Art History, a position that is generously supported by the Ishibashi Foundation (Tokyo) and enables the institute to invite two leading scholars in the field of Japanese Art History to Heidelberg twice every year. The continuous support of the Ishibashi Foundation allows the Institute to broaden its course offer to include highly specialized topics. By 2024, the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the agreement, 32 visiting professors from Japan, Australia, the USA, and other European countries had taught at the institute. The anniversary was celebrated with the symposium "Narrating Japanese Art Histories," which was preceded by the 2015 conference "Histories of Japanese Art and their Global Contexts." In 2011, Melanie Trede also established a Heinz Götze Visiting Professorship for Chinese Art History, which allows the institute to invite one internationally acclaimed expert in this field to teach in Heidelberg. Over the last 15 years, the Heinz Götze Stiftung has made it possible to bring 15 visiting professors from across China, the U.K., and the U.S., including the Central Academy of Fine Arts, The Palace Museum, Peking University, The British Museum, Academia Sinica, The Ohio State University, University of California (UCLA and UCSD), Zhejiang University and The University of Oxford. Both Ishibashi and Heinz Götze foundations also offer scholarships for students at the institute to conduct fieldwork for their projects.
In 2014, Melanie Trede began developing the digitization project "Hachiman Digital Handscrolls," which was funded through the university's internal Field of Focus 3 (FOF 3) infrastructure. In this project, she worked with students and the developers of the software HyperImage to develop a website that enabled a comparative investigation of different versions of the " Karmic Origins of the Great Hachiman Bodhisattva" (Hachiman engi emaki). Professor Trede also studied the relationships between image and text within the collaborative research project SFB 933 "Material Text Cultures" and the BMBF project "Developing a concept for digitizing Japanese Scrolls in German Collections." Her focus on narrative painting culminated in the co-curation of the 2021 exhibit Love, Fight, Feast, which she curated together with Khanh Trinh and Prof. Estelle Bauer (INALCO) at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich.
In 2005, the Institute of East Asian Art History (IKO) merged with the Institutes of Sinology and Japanese Studies to form the Center for East Asian Studies (ZO). The ZO is one of the largest and prominent teaching and research institutions for East Asian studies in Germany and Europe.
It boasts a large, specialized library with up-to-date holdings and special collections (Chinese periodicals from the Republican era, Chinese comics, Chinese music and film, modern Japanese prose and literature), as well as internationally renowned scholars who teach at the ZO. The integration of the Institute of East Asian Art History with CATS and ZO culminated in the institute’s move to the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies on the Bergheim campus in 2019, with a newly built CATS Library housing all specialized collections for our academic programs.
After Prof. Sarah E. Fraser became chair for Chinese Art History in 2012, the Institute expanded its connections with organizations worldwide, forging closer ties with institutions in China and Europe. Through funding from the University Excellence Initiative 2016-2018, IKO organized three projects that brought together scholars, curators, and officials from China, the Middle East, Central Asia and the U.K. We partnered with The Palace Museum (Beijing), The Dunhuang Academy, and the Shanghai Museum in the series “Collaboration with PRC China’s Museums of Excellence,” in 2016. With additional university support within the “Fields of Focus Initiative,” our institute conducted a collaborative agreement with the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, researching, publishing, and exhibiting the spectacular holdings of Chinese porcelain and chinoiserie in the Dresden State Collections, 2014-2018.
The Getty Foundation’s support, also secured by Sarah Fraser, has made it possible to further strengthen the institutional connections with and conduct research in European, U.K., and Chinese archives, libraries, museums, and universities. The 2014-2017 project, “Chinese Artists Trained in Europe,” brought participants to collections and sites holding critical materials to identify transcultural exchanges between Europe and China during the Sino-Japanese Wars.
The institute has also established close contacts with all major institutions in the field of East Asian Art in Europe, especially with museums in Germany, such as the Humboldt Forum (Berlin), the Museum of East Asian Art (Cologne), the Linden Museum (Stuttgart), the Museum Applied Arts (Frankfurt) and the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Hamburg). International collections, such as the Rietberg Museum (Zurich), the MAK (Vienna), the Art & History Museum (Brussels), the Musée Guimet and Musée Cernuschi (Paris), the Tokyo National Museum, the Tokyo National Institute for Cultural Properties, the British Museum (London), the Palace Museum (Beijing), and the National Palace Museum (Taipei) have also become points of contact for IKO researchers and students. In addition, the institute also fosters a close relationship with the Heidelberg Ethnological Museum of the J. & E. von Portheim Stiftung and has collaborated with the Museum on several projects.
KO currently has a full professorship for Chinese Art History (Prof. Sarah E. Fraser, since 2012), a full professorship for Japanese Art History, and two assistant professor positions.
List of assistant professors since 2000:
Alexander Hofmann (1999–2004)
Petra Rösch (1999–2005)
Anton Schweizer (2004–2011)
Mio Wakita-Elis (2004–2021)
Clarissa von Spee (2005)
Angelika Borchert (2006)
Simone Grießmayer (2006–2007)
Nicole Tsuda (2008–2009)
Cordula Treimer (2008–2012)
Christoph Büttner (2008–2014)
Catrin Kost (2012–2013)
Lianming Wang (2014–2021)
Karolin Randhahn (2016)
Dinah Zank (2019–2021)
Katharina Rode-Kaya (since 2019)
Monica Klasing Chen (since 2021)
Margó Krewinkel (2022–2024)