Yuka Kadoi. Revisiting Timurid jades

Yuka Kadoi
Dr Yuka Kadoi is an art historian specialising in the cross-cultural exchanges of objects, ideas, and images in pre-modern Islamic Eurasia. Her research focuses on aspects of Persian art historiography in the early twentieth century. She is currently preparing a book on of jade objects in The al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait. She has written or edited numerous books and articles, including Islamic Chinoiserie (2009); The Shaping of Persian Art (2013); and Arthur Upham Pope and A New Survey of Persian Art (2016).
Revisiting Timurid jades
Widely produced not only in East Asia but also in Islamic West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia, the nephrite hardstone known more commonly as jade exerted a long-lasting impact on the shaping of cultural identities across great swathes of Asia. While many aspects of the production of jade objects prior to and following the rise of Islam in West Asia in the 7th century remain unclear, a good number of surviving examples of carved nephrite attributable to the 15th century suggest that a certain fashion of jade objects took a decisive shape under Timurid rule (1370–1507). This serves to offer one of the important patterns of cultural interactions between East Asia and the Islamic world and will be the primary topic of this lecture.