Shrines on exhibit subject of debate

Featuring a life-size architectural reconstruction of the Wu Family Shrines, a new exhibit at the University Art Museum highlights the controversy surrounding the shrines' true identity.

For centuries, scholars have viewed the Wu Family Shrines in the Shandong province of China as a central source of information on the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E. – 220 C.E.). But in the last few years, Cary Liu, curator of Asian art for the University Art Museum, and an international team of scholars have begun questioning the origin of the shrines.

"The Wu Family Shrine may not have been the Wu family, may not have been a shrine, and may not even be Han Dynasty," said Nicola Knipe, assistant editor of the museum and project editor for a catalogue released on the subject.

The exhibition features about a hundred ink-on-paper rubbings taken from carvings on shrines. The rubbings — a highly regarded art form practiced by Chinese artists over several centuries — represent in two dimensions many of the human figures and objects also on display at the museum that are characteristic of the Han Dynasty.

"The focus of the show is that the rubbings call into question what we know about the Han Dynasty based on the Wu Family Shrine," Knipe said. "The Wu Shrines have been a benchmark in the study of Chinese history, and they may be misleading."

Liu and his colleagues began studying inconsistencies in the ink rubbings in 1998.

No record of the second-century shrines exists before the 11th century, and the stones themselves were only discovered in 1786. "There were so many contradictions," Liu said.

By comparing the ink rubbings to each other, he discovered that carvings in the very earliest rubbings are only 10 to 20 percent legible, but later rubbings show up to 80 percent legibility. Liu said some of the craftsmen that created the ink rubbings might have retouched the carvings as they worked to keep them legible.

"The rubbing process itself destroys the stone," he said. "You're losing some of the detail. You have to add it back but if you don't know what's there, you have to make it up."

Liu believes the Wu Family Shrines date to the Han period, but changes made to the carvings in later centuries may have misled many scholars in their research.

"What shocked me was that of all the scholars that have studied this particular site, only about two or three have looked at the actual stone," he said. "Most people were following up on descriptions, so it becomes a textual study."

Liu explained that, in an effort to bring order to the material they study, scholars often have to make an educated guess about something they cannot prove.

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"That reconstruction, which is not pure fact, is then taken on by the next generation of scholars," he said. "It's almost like playing telephone, and by the end you have something very different."

To emphasize the importance of studying the actual stone as opposed to the ink rubbings, Liu mentioned a rubbing published in the early 20th century as belonging to the site.

"No one could identify it or find the stone," he said. "But we looked at it, and we discovered that this stone must have been a rubbing of a round column."

Once he began looking for a column instead of a square section on the walls to match the rubbings, Liu discovered it in the basement of a museum in Berlin. Originally part of the front façade of the Wu Shrine, it is now on display at the University Art Museum.

Because many people have used information from the Wu Family shrines in their work on the Han Dynasty, the exhibit will be controversial, Knipe said, but the exhibit is exciting even beyond the debates.

"It's really beautiful," she said. "It's been really very well received."

The exhibit, "Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of the Wu Family Shrines," is on view from March 5 until June 26.