Art and Environment in Kyoto in the Time of Supernova 1006

In the spring of the year 1006 a spectacular new star appeared in the skies over Kyoto. People said it was as bright as the sun. For the next 18 months it lit up the night sky and could be seen during the day as well. Ongoing rituals were held at the palace and at temples and shrines to placate this bright new visitor. The star is known today as SN 1006, a spectacular supernova whose remnants can still be seen as the double star κ Lupi in the constellation Lupus. It is believed to have been the largest supernova recorded in human history. This event—exogenous and unpredicted—was but one of a series of environmental and biological interventions that struck Kyoto circa 1000. What this means for our understanding of the complex of art practices that emerged during the same period—a complex profoundly bound up with what we now identify as “traditional” or “native” Japanese culture—is the theme of my talk. I proceed on the premise that the rapid transformation of Kyoto art and culture circa 1000 was a function of a threshold phenomenon in which a series of exogenous—and stochastic—environmental factors triggered a geometric progression, or phase shift, in which an array of small causes and coincidences produced maximum effects in the cultural domain whose summed result was paradigm shift.

Lecturer information: Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan received her Ph.D. in Japanese Art from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1988. She has taught at Yale University since 1990. In her work Yiengpruksawan focuses on Buddhist art and iconography with an emphasis on political and social perspectives in the analysis of imagery and ritual. She is currently completing a series of books that examine the Buddhist cultural productions of early Kyoto from a revisionist perspective grounded in primary records and material evidence. Since the early 1990s Yiengpruksawan has also maintained a research and teaching commitment to modern Asian art.