For Immediate Release

Contact: Barbara K. Laskin or Doug Stone
October 4, 2004
(651) 696-6203

Lecture on 18th-Century Chinese Art by Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator, Nov. 5 at Macalester

St. Paul, Minn. - Maxwell K. Hearn, Curator of Chinese Art, Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, will speak on "Art, Artifice, and Identity: Imaging the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-1795)" at 7 pm, Fri., Nov. 5, 2004, in the Ruth Stricker Dayton Campus Center, John B. Davis Lecture Hall, 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, Minn. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Hearn joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1971 and received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1990. He has helped to organize many exhibitions of Chinese art at the museum, and has authored numerous articles and books, including Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei (1996) and Cultivated Landscapes: Chinese Paintings from the Collection of Marie-Hélène and Guy Weill (2002). He is one of the distinguished contributors to the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's current and critically acclaimed special exhibition, "China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200-750 AD" (2004). Hearn is also an adjunct professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Hearn will speak on the topic of European influences on the art of Qing-dynasty imperial portraiture, focusing on the omnipotent Qianlong emperor, who aspired to present himself as an archetypal monarch in the martial, religious, and cultural areas of Chinese and Manchu life, and who achieved this goal by sponsoring a new synthesis of Chinese and Western painting that resulted in idealized imperial portraits.

Macalester is a private, national liberal arts college with a full-time enrollment of 1,845 students. Macalester is nationally recognized for its long-standing commitment to academic excellence, internationalism, diversity and civic engagement.

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