Rare and Beautiful Objects, New and Unexpected Findings: Revisiting Harvard’s Early Chinese Jades

More than 40 years after Max Loehr published the first comprehensive catalogue of the Grenville L. Winthrop collection of archaic Chinese jades, the Harvard Art Museums present a new book featuring highlights of the collection by Jenny F. So. To mark this new publication, So will share how her research and ideas have benefited from the nearly half-century of archaeological discoveries and technical investigations related to jade, and the surprises that came with hands-on object study. She will also discuss the broader questions raised by this new knowledge and their relevance in collection-based teaching and research at a university museum such as Harvard’s.

So’s research into the collection—which spans China’s Neolithic to late Bronze Age (c. 4000–100 BCE) and beyond—reveals the sociopolitical, philosophical-religious contexts for the creation of jade artifacts, the importance of the material to object shape and state of preservation, and some of the reasons behind the lasting impact of jade in Chinese society throughout subsequent millennia. While the book relays this narrative in more detail, in her lecture So will focus on a few outstanding examples to illustrate some of these issues.

Early Chinese Jades in the Harvard Art Museums (2019) by Jenny So will be available in the Harvard Art Museums shop, beginning in February 2019.

Jenny F. So received her B.A. from Swarthmore College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from Harvard University. She has served as senior curator of Ancient Chinese Art at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, the Smithsonian Institution, in charge of the rich holdings of both collections. She left the Smithsonian Institution to take up the position of professor of fine arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and later, was also appointed director of that university’s Institute of Chinese Studies and Art Museum. She retired from her full-time Hong Kong appointments in 2015, retaining an association as adjunct professor, and returned to live in Arlington, Virginia, where she continues to publish while serving as a specialist-consultant in Chinese art for American and international educational and commercial institutions.