Scholars such as Wu Hung examine early imperial Chinese tombs, reading their contents, symbolism, and spatiality against contemporaneous understandings of death and the afterlife. Much of the extant scholarship considers art, ritual, and religious beliefs as they relate to singular memorials or, more broadly, typologies of funerary art of a particular region or historical era. Several of the essays offer innovative reinterpretations and new insights into canonical works of Asian death art, from a wide temporal and chronological scope, bringing multiple visual cultures, religious, and ritual practices into pan-Asian dialogue. Rather than accepting fixed meanings for these artworks, we highlighted their dynamic nature and examined ways in which their audiences, meanings, and functions change over time. As panelists, we were inspired by the continent’s rich and varied visual expressions of death, memorialization, the afterlife, soteriology, and eschatology.
The panel examined arts of death in pan-Asian visual cultures and in different media, from ancient times to the present. This themed volume of Ars Orientalis, titled “The Arts of Death in Asia,” is the culmination of a panel of the same name held at the 2012 Association of Asian Studies annual conference in Toronto. Death-related art may convey terror, devastating loss, resolution, heroic paradigms, or paths to liberation. Through time and space, artists and their patrons have responded to this unpleasant truth by creating works of art that help the living cope with the passing of loved ones, ensure that the dead are not forgotten, and secure salvation and comfort in the afterlife. As poignantly voiced by these two poems-the first by a Chinese Song dynasty literati poet, whose work was inspired by the deaths of his wife and several children the other, a jisei (poem written at the end of life) by a Japanese Zen monk-death’s inevitability is an uncomfortable, yet undeniable, aspect of life.
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