East Asian Studies
Date October 4, 2023
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Carved Alive: What Living Tree Icons in Japan (Tachikibutsu) May Be Telling Us

The Graduate Students’ Association for East Asian Studies cordially invites you to a guest lecture by Professor Gregory Levine, Department of History of Art in UC Berkeley.

Event poster with person carving a tree.

  • Presented by: Gregory Levine, UC Berkeley.
  • East Asian Studies Colloquium Series
  • October 04, 2023  3:30 - 5:00PM
  • Petteruti Lounge
    75 Waterman St.
  • Refreshments provided

Buddhist Icons have been carved into living trees in Japan for centuries. In such icons we find dense and lively convergences: numinous trees and arboreal material, plant physiology and human presencing of the divine, ritual and soteriology, and human and more-than-human lives, inter-relationships, and contingencies. We find worlds brought into contact at blade’s edge in visualization, wounding, and healing. A sharp politics, if you will, of human incisions into biota and in the religious and visual-material systems that constitute the iconic. What might such trees carved alive, and trees-as-trees, disclose to us as we (re)imagine the ecological arts and humanities, Buddhist iconicity, and Buddhist environmentalism?

Greg Levine is Professor and recent Chair (Fall 2020-2023) of the Department of History of Art, UC Berkeley. His current book project is, A Tree and A Buddha: Imagining an Arboreal Humanism, and he is at work on a projected trilogy: Long Strange Journey: On Modern Zen, Zen Art, and Other Predicaments (2017); Buddha Heads: Fragments and Landscapes; and other Buddhas: White Supremacy and Buddhist Visual Culture. The recipient of a Guggenheim and other fellowships, he is an editorial board member of Artibus Asiae and the Journal of Art Historiography. His courses introduce global Buddhist visual cultures; eco art history; plunder, iconoclasm, and forgery; and the fragment in visual-material culture.