The Eternal Feast: Exhibit at Princeton University Art Museum

As we prepare our feasts this holiday season, the Princeton University Art Museum offers visitors an opportunity to look back at the significant role played by feasts in another era.

The Eternal Feast: Banqueting in Chinese Art from the 10th to the 14th Century traces the art of the feast through three transformative Chinese dynasties: the Song, Liao, and Yuan, periods when China enjoyed a thriving economy, when its culture flourished, and when foreign and native traditions intermingled. Focusing on a rare group of surviving paintings from the period—along with feast-related ceramic, lacquer, metal, and stone objects as well as textiles—the exhibit reveals the influence China's culture of feasting had on the formation of artistic traditions. Several other aspects of elite feasting—including costume, cuisine, music, and dance, as well as burial customs—are also explored, underscoring the important role feasts and banquets played in shaping funerary rituals, social status, gender identity, and politics whose cultural influence extends in China to the present day. On display during the holidays, the exhibit serves as a timely reminder that photo bombing your family's Thanksgiving dinner photos or creating a festive holiday pine cone centerpiece for the table may eventually have more cultural significance than you think.

The Eternal Feast: Banqueting in Chinese Art from the 10th to the 14th Century
Through February 16, 2020
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton
artmuseum.princeton.edu