Title: Persianism and the Domes of Medieval East Asia

Speaker: Dr. Minku Kim

Date: Tuesday, May 29th, 2018

Time: 7pm

Language: English

Register at: visitors@liangyimuseum.com

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As our Blue Road: Mastercrafts from Persia exhibition draws to a close, we are happy to host one last lecture related to the topic. Co-sponsored by Asia Week Hong Kong 2018, we are delighted to invite Dr. Minku Kim to speak on the topic of domes from the Persian empire.

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Though less celebrated today than their counterparts in the Roman and Byzantine West, the domes of ancient Iran were monumental in their own right. Featuring a distinctive structural device known as squinches, Persian domes flourished between the Parthian(247BC - 224AD) and Sasanian (224 - 651AD) periods. In fact, the domes that we now see on top of nearly every mosque worldwide were derived from these earlier precedents, although the ideas of these domes had transmitted beyond Persia well before the advent of Islam. The talk introduces the evolution of domes in East Asia, and as a major case in point, introduces the 8th century Seokguram Grotto in South Korea, a UNESCO World Heritage site, in connection with its Iranian and Central Asian contemporaries and prototypes. 

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Dr. Minku Kim is an assistant professor of fine arts at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, specialising China between the Han and Tang period (206 BCE-907 CE), particularly in relation to Buddhism.