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Join curator Dr Alex Burchmore for a floor talk on the Unearthed exhibition.

About the exhibition

Burial customs of early China provide a rare window into life in the ancient world. Elaborate tomb furnishings reflected evolving understandings of the living realm and the hereafter. Over the centuries, personal objects placed in tombs to accompany the dead were gradually replaced by representations of everyday objects and specialised forms. This ultimately led to the more formalised production of funerary ceramics for use in burial.

This exhibition presents a selection of Chinese funerary art from the collection of the ������ýapp Gallery of Australia. This rarely exhibited burial paraphernalia dates from formative periods of Chinese history, from the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) to the Song dynasty (960–1279). These objects offer a glimpse into the cultural practices and beliefs surrounding life and death, as well as insight into the craftsmanship of the funerary market and the spatial arrangement of Chinese tombs.   

About the Speaker

Dr Alex Burchmore is an art historian, arts writer, and Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorial Studies at the Australian ������ýapp University, Canberra. He specialises in the study of Chinese art, past and present, with a broader focus on travel and mobility, trade and exchange, and meetings of the personal and the material. His first book, New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art(University of California Press, 2023), traces the myriad ways in which Chinese artists, inside and outside China, have used porcelain from the 1990s to the present to shape their visions of individual and cultural identity.

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Image: Lokapāla guardian figure (detail), Tang dynasty, 618–907; painted earthenware. Gift of TT Tsui, Hong Kong, through the ������ýapp Gallery of Australian Foundation 1995. Image courtesy of the ������ýapp Gallery of Australia.