Jessica Rawson, a British art historian and curator specializing in ancient Chinese art, has been named this year’s winner of the Tang Prize in Sinology for “her gift and mastery of the craft of the visible to read the art and artifacts of Chinese civilization.”
Tang Prize selection committee for Sinology chairman David Wang (王德威), a Chinese literature academic and Academia Sinica academician, made the announcement at a news conference in Taipei yesterday.
“By giving voice to the ancient world of objects, Jessica Rawson has taught generations how to see when they look at things, and her acuity and vast visual learning have given a new insight into the world of the lineages, transformations and migrations of mute things,” Wang said.
Photo: CNA
The 79-year-old British academic said she was “incredibly honored” to be awarded the prize.
Rawson is considered a leading art historian of ancient Chinese art, with a particular interest in the cosmology of the Chinese Han period and its relationship to tombs and their decorations.
She has written numerous books on topics such as Chinese jade, Chinese poets from the 7th to the 13th centuries and Chinese silver of the Tang Dynasty, and was a renowned keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum.
After many years at the British Museum, Rawson was Warden of Merton College, University of Oxford, from 1994 until her retirement in 2010. She served as pro-vice chancellor at the university for five years from 2006.
She is currently an honorary research associate at the university’s School of Archaeology.
Her achievement in Chinese studies has also won her a number honors in China, among them an honorary professorship at Peking University.
“I started to be interested in China at a very, very young age when I was in primary school,” Rawson said after learning she had been awarded the prize.
She said her mother, who was interested in art and culture, introduced her to East Asian art, in particular the art of China and Japan, and that was when she fell in love with Chinese characters.
That interest evolved when she was a student at the University of Cambridge. While studying there, Rawson did her first major excavation in Jordan, where archeologists unearthed Chinese ceramics that had arrived through trade with the Middle East.
“I started to see archeology was the way to learn more about China,” she said.
The Tang Prize Foundation said that Rawson’s contributions show that “besides the written word, there is another talent, another craft, which, by reading the arts and artifacts of the world, allows us to interpret and understand distant and ancient societies, with their beliefs and interactions.”
Rawson also develops and promotes exchanges in the field of sinology to help the public better understand Chinese civilization with the exhibitions she curated at the British Museum, it said.
The Tang Prize is a biennial award established in 2012 by Taiwanese entrepreneur Samuel Yin (尹衍樑) to honor people who have made prominent contributions in four categories — sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, sinology and rule of law.
The Tang Prize in Sinology recognizes the study of sinology, and awards are given for research on China and its related fields, such as Chinese thought, history, philology, linguistics, archeology, philosophy, religion, traditional canons, literature and art, excluding literary and art works.
Environmental groups yesterday filed an appeal with the Executive Yuan, seeking to revoke the environmental impact assessment (EIA) conditionally approved in February for the Hsieh-ho Power Plant’s planned fourth liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving station off the coast of Keelung. The appeal was filed jointly by the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group, the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association and the Keelung City Taiwan Head Cultural Association, which together held a news conference outside the Executive Yuan in Taipei. Explaining the reasons for the appeal, Wang Hsing-chih (王醒之) of the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group said that the EIA failed to address
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked