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Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Michelle Wang, "The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Description: What can a map do, beyond showing us where things are?
Michelle Wang's new book, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China (U Chicago Press, 2023), explores this question through images painted on bronze, wood, and silk that were buried in tombs between the fourth and second centuries BCE. Wang encourages readers to look at these images as terrestrial diagrams — pictures that didn’t just represent the world, but made worlds. These tools helped the living connect with the dead, linked earthly and cosmic orders, and imagined what the afterlife might look like.
Each of the four...