The image above is part of a famous series of illustrations of Xixiangji (The Story of the Western Wing) and dates from right before the fall of the Ming dynasty. The particular woodblock print depicts a zoumadeng, a revolving lantern powered by the heat of a candle.
Six months ago, Tina Lu gave a lecture at UCLA about a seventeenth-century community of lens specialists (what Joseph Needham calls "optick artists"). That talk suggested some ways to consider both the object and the image in the context of an early modern discourse first on materiality and also on what cannot be spoken. Prof. Lu has since returned to these sources and revised her earlier reading of their writings. Come to find out what she has learned.
The UCLA Taiwan Studies Lectureship is a joint program of the UCLA Asia Institute and the Dean of Humanities and is made possible with funding from the Department of International and Cross-Strait Education, Ministry of Education, Taiwan, represented by the Education Division, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles.