The Politics of Zoomorphic Art at the Porous Borders in China and Central Asia (500 BCE-500 CE)

Speaker: Petya Andreeva, Assistant Professor of Asian Art History, Vassar College
The Politics of Zoomorphic Art at the Porous Borders in China and Central Asia (500 BCE-500 CE)
April 8, 2026

Sponsored: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, UC Berkeley

Video Segments:

00:00 Start
00:00:21 Welcome Introduction: Sanjyot Mehendale Ph.D | Chair, Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, UC Berkeley
00:03:52 Speaker: Petya Andreeva, Assistant Professor of Asian Art History, Vassar College
Stretching from the Mongolian-Manchurian grassland to the Hungarian plain, the Eurasian steppe was once home to several major nomadic confederations that played a pivotal role in the formation of a global Eurasian milieu. Active as both intermediaries and independent historical actors on the Eurasian steppe route, Iron-Age pastoral nomads invented and circulated an elaborate visual language rooted in zoomorphism. Nomadic design tropes, now known loosely in art historical literature as “animal style”, managed to cross geographical and cultural boundaries and permeate the aesthetic systems of their sedentary neighbors, crossing especially swiftly the northern Chinese periphery. This lecture explores the convergent notions of zoomorphism that enabled the heightened contact between Eurasian nomads and their southern neighbor in the Warring States (475-221 BCE) and the Western Han (220 BCE – 9 CE). Exchange between China and the steppe nomads was all too often opportunistic, but never resulted in true reciprocity; even so, China was able to consolidate its place in the economic and geopolitical landscape of northern and central Asia precisely due to its ability to understand and reproduce the conceptual designs of nomadic metalwork. Moreover, Chinese elites started to incorporate elements from nomadic art in their own mortuary programs, in a likely attempt to showcase their worldliness, vast networks, and growing access to the so-called “Barbaric Other”. In the context of Chinese burials, nomadic art became the ultimate cultural and political capital.

Petya Andreeva is Assistant Professor of Asian Art History at Vassar College. She earned her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the monograph “Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE” (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), and the editor of the volume “The Zoomorphic Arts of Ancient Central Eurasia” (MDPI, 2023). Andreeva’s work on cross-cultural exchange in ancient and medieval Chinese and Central Asian art has appeared in the Art Bulletin, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Early China, Fashion Theory, Archaeological Research in Asia. Her scholarship has also been featured on popular news outlets such as the History Channel and Voices on Central Asia. She is the recipient of several international awards, including UNESCO’s Silk Road Research Grant and the Getty-ACLS Fellowship in the History of Art.

Видео The Politics of Zoomorphic Art at the Porous Borders in China and Central Asia (500 BCE-500 CE) канала Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, UC Berkeley