Holly Shaffer Ta‘ziyas are ephemeral shrines made of bright paper and bamboo that South Asian artisans have been constructing from at least the eighteenth century (Fig. 1). They are modeled on monumental tombs built for Shi‘i Muslims who had died centuries before and thousands of miles away in distant West…
Chelsea Foxwell “[T]he lilt of a flying wasp, the pitch of a flying duck, a mantis in fighting position, or a semi [cicada] toddling up a cedar branch to sing. All this art is alive, intensely alive, and our corresponding art looks absolutely dead beside it.” — Lafcadio Hearn, 1893[1]…
Lan Wu In 1808, a Tibetan Buddhist reincarnate (Tib. trülku, Mon. bla-ma, hereafter trülku) from the Labrang Monastery in northeastern Tibet named Jamyang Tubten Nyima (1779-1862) travelled to southern and eastern Mongolia (Fig. 1), where Tibetan Buddhism had flourished during the previous century.[1] On his trip, Jamyang Tubten Nyima, the…
Imran bin Tajudeen The eighteenth century stands as a neglected period in the study of the mosques of Southeast Asia (Fig. 1). The major scholarly surveys of Southeast Asia’s mosque architecture that go beyond description either focus on examples from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries,[1] or restrict their analysis to…