Dr. Lianming Wang

Forschung

Transgressive Animals, Territorial Locality,
and the Qing Global Histories

Projektleitung: Dr. Lianming Wang | Laufzeit: Januar 2021 – Februar 2024
Gefördert durch die Gerda Henkel Stiftung

Animal enjoyed a momentous status in China’s early-modern histories as both the subject and object of long-distance commercial interactions and vibrant global encounters. Defined as “transgressive animals,” ranging from Central Asian steeds and peacocks to Mediterranean coral and hornbill skull, shagreen, pangolin scale, and numerous feather tributes from South Asia, their transterritorial and indeed global movement deconstructed existing ecological, sociobiological, and even geopolitical regimes.  This interdisciplinary project seeks to explore the entangled history of China’s reimagined geopolitics through an analytical “animal lens.” Approaching four themes connected to transterritorial animals – space and built environment, monumentality, materiality, and knowledge –, it attempts to discuss the wide array of agencies that animals performed in shaping economic, diplomatic and artistic connections in terms of their types of movement – physical, conceptual, commercial and intellectual. To be specific, the project explores the multi-layered copying and translation of images, issues of collecting and display as well as the entangled histories of material practices that relate to transgressive animals in order to scrutinize the early-modern transcultural dynamics.