Juliane Noth:
Flowers and Plant Knowledge in Chinese Painting

Flowers are among the most common motifs in Chinese painting, yet beside a small number of plants with highly symbolic connotations, such as the plum blossom, the orchid, or bamboo, their cultural meaning beyond the formal or auspicious is little explored. But many of the plants shown in paintings were also used as foodstuffs and medicine, thus having a very physical rather than aesthetic impact upon ingestion. In this talk, I will sketch the connections between pharmacological, nutritional, symbolic and aesthetic uses of flowers, herbs and vegetables in paintings, materia medica, encyclopedias and related objects, and ask how these different functions influenced each other. Arguably it is the material and sensory qualities and aesthetic properties of flowers, herbs, and vegetables that produce the knowledge and symbolic uses that accreted around them. Put differently, flowers, grasses and other plants shape their own formation as Wissensfiguren in images and texts. Juliane Noth will undertake a cross-reading of visual and textual sources to follow the entanglements of art and visual culture, local history, poetry, and medicine. She will also reflect on some of the methodological challenges that she encountered while working on this paper.

Juliane Noth is Professor of East Asian Art History at Freie Universität Berlin and Visiting Professor at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. The focus of her research is on Chinese art and visual culture of the twentieth century. She is the author of Landschaft und Revolution: Die Malerei von Shi Lu (Berlin: Reimer, 2009) and Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting (Harvard Asia Center, 2022), which was awarded the 2024 Bei Shan Tang Monograph Prize for Chinese art history from the Association of Asian Studies. Beside her interest in flower painting she is currently working on two research projects: One is on artistic practices during the Cultural Revolution, the other is titled “Art Academies in China: Global Histories and Institutional Practices”. For this project she received a Consolidator Grant from the European Union.