Chinese Art In Ledderose's Eyes

Lothar Ledderose is an important contemporary East Asian art historian. His Ten Thousand Things (2000) won for him The Levenson Prize of 2002. In 2005, Ledderose was awarded Balzan Prize, as the second honored art historian after Ernst Gombrich. Through Ledderose's effort, Heidelberg University becomes another center for Chinese art history research, the other two being Princeton university (represented by Wen. C. Fang) and UC Berkeley University (represented by James Cahill). Decades of academic research enabled Ledderose to successfully build his Chinese artistic world, presenting before us a very creative and charming picture. In order to further understand his contribution in this field, this doctoral dissertation studies his three academic works: Mi Fu and the Classical Tradition of Chinese Calligraphy (1979), Orchideen und Felsen (1998), and Ten Thousand Things, probing into the author's main ideas and methods and demonstrating the value of his work. In the second part of the paper, Ledderose's intellectual environment is also examined. By looking at him in an academic context, this dissertation tries to roughly sketch the scholar's location in western academic circle.Starting from the turning of the millennium, another of Ledderose's big projects: the research of sutra carving has bore good fruit. With sutra carving studies, Lothar Ledderose keeps marching towards his goal: making common people understand and appreciate Chinese art.