Newsroom
College to Co-Host Tibetan Symposium
Occidental College is joining the Pacific Asia Museum to co-host the first-ever symposium on Tibetan furniture from 8:15 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 15 at the Pasadena Conference Center, Lower Level, 300 E. Green St.
General admission tickets are $10 ($5 for students and teachers; $8 for museum members). Please call (626) 449-2742 Ext. 35 to make your reservation.
The symposium will be an interdisciplinary exploration of Tibetan furniture as a new subject for art history, religious studies, anthropology, Tibetan studies, and other related fields. Nine featured speakers will represent a variety of backgrounds and institutions. They include scholars from area universities, practitioners, collectors, and staff from the Pacific Asia Museum.
Occidental art history Professor Louise Yuhas, who will pose questions to the speakers, said the symposium and related Pacific Asia Museum exhibition is a rare opportunity to study and discuss centuries-old furniture that in many cases was lost during the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1949 and later during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
“Very seldom to we know the exact provenance of the pieces we’re seeing because they’ve come from of a lot of different routes, many via Nepal,” Yuhas said. “There is still furniture emerging today in markets in Katmandu and such places, but a tremendous amount has been destroyed.