Asian Art and History

Lecture

Asian Art and History Voices and Spaces of a Chinese Home and Its Voyage to America

Nancy Berliner, Ph.D., Professor of East Asian Art, Curator of Chinese Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Yin Yu Tang is a 250-year-old house from a small mountain village in China, inhabited over the centuries by eight generations of one family, now standing at the center of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Join curator Nancy Berliner as she gives her first-hand account of coming upon the house, the process of working with the government officials to bring the house to Massachusetts, her conversations with family members about the house’s history, what it took to ship it to the other side of the world, rebuilding it on site and creating a narrative for the hundreds of thousands of people who now visit the house each year.

This presentation is part of the Asian Art and History series.

Nancy Berliner

Nancy Berliner

Nancy Berliner, Ph.D., a historian of Chinese art and architecture, is the Wu Tung Curator of Chinese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Until 2012, she was the curator of Chinese art at the Peabody Essex Museum and the curator of Yin Yu Tang, a 200-year-old rural Chinese house now at the museum. She also serves as an interpretive and curatorial advisor to the World Monuments Fund on the conservation project for the Qianlong Garden at the Forbidden City in Beijing. Her undergraduate and graduate studies were completed at Harvard University, with additional studies at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing.