Adjunct Associate Professor
Middle-Eastern and Asian Studies
hsiaoll@unc.edu
Li-Ling Hsiao research interests include the history of Chinese painting, the history of Chinese print culture, the history of Chinese drama, and the history of Chinese kung-fu novels. This interdisciplinary approach is fully demonstrated in the book and papers she have published. Her first book, titled The Eternal Present of the Past: Performance, Illustration, and Reading in the Wanli Period (1573-1619) [Leiden: Brill, 2007], is an interdisciplinary studythat draws together various elements of Wanli culture – illustration, painting, theater, literature, philosophy – and examines their interrelation in the context of the drama publication. Specifically, it examines a prevalent late Ming conception of the stage as a mystical space in which the past was reborn within the present. This temporal conflation allowed the past to serve as a vigorous and immediate moral example and was considered an important mechanism by which the continuity of the Confucian tradition could be upheld. By inscribing theatrical conventions of stage arrangement, acting gesture, and frontal address, drama illustration recreated the mystical character of the stage space within the pages of the book, and thus set the conflation of past and present on a broader footing.