Dear colleagues and friends, Hope you are doing well there. Our own Freda Murck is going to deliver the 2022 Franklin D. Murphy Lecture Series! Please see the email below for more details. Warm wishes, Ya Zuo Secretary, Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Dear Colleagues, It is my great pleasure to invite you to the 2022 Franklin D. Murphy Lecture Series by Dr. Alfreda Murck. Dr. Murck will give her first lecture *Rethinking Guo Xi’s “Mountains have Three Distances”* on *Friday, February 11, 2022, 5:30 pm CST*, at the Spencer Museum of Art Stokstad Lecture Hall, University of Kansas. The event will also be broadcast online via Zoom. Please register with us to receive the Zoom link: https://kansas.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TVNSluLtRAKocyC3HHzCew Established in 1979 through the Kansas University Endowment Association in honor of former chancellor Dr. Franklin D. Murphy, the Murphy Lectureship in Art brings distinguished art historians, critics, and artists to the University of Kansas, where they participate in the teaching of a graduate seminar in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History and deliver two public lectures, one at the Spencer Museum of Art and one at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the published versions of which are presented in this series. The series has since 2015 been published by the University of California Press in association with the Spencer Museum of Art and the Kress Foundation Department of Art History. Previous titles were published by the Spencer Museum of Art (1983-2003) and the University of Washington Press in association with the Spencer Museum of Art (2008-2015). Feel free to forward the message to those who might be interested. Thank you, Weitian ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– February 11, 2022 5:30 pm CST Spencer Museum of Art 211 *Rethinking Guo Xi’s "Mountains have Three Distances"* https://arthistory.ku.edu/events The Three Distances are landscape compositional modes that were first described in a text attributed to the eleventh-century master Guo Xi. The compositions are described in *Lofty Message of Forest and Streams*, a text that Guo Xi’s son, Guo Si, compiled from his father’s teachings. They are high distance, deep distance, and level distance. Prior to the eleventh century, all three modes existed, but mountain landscapes dominated and no one wrote about them in “three-distance” terms. This lecture will examine the late eleventh-century enthusiastic embrace of level-distance landscapes. I will suggest that flat, watery paintings were inspired by literary tropes that referred to living on rivers and lakes as a recluse or an exiled official. The high and deep distance landscapes had a wide range of positive meanings depending on the artist, context, and audience. In the charged factional atmosphere of the late-eleventh century, the level-distance landscape composition became a comment on leaving court service, either by choice or as punishment. These were not the sort of paintings welcomed by the imperial court.