Garland of Visions: Color, Tantra, and a Material History of Indian Painting

Garland of Visions explores the generative relationships between artistic intelligence and tantric vision practices in the construction and circulation of visual knowledge in medieval South Asia. Shifting away from the traditional connoisseur approach, Jinah Kim instead focuses on the materiality of painting: its mediums, its visions, and especially its colors. She argues that the adoption of the pothi-format manuscript as a medium for painting in Indic religious circles enabled the material translation of a private and internal experience of "seeing" into a portable device. These mobile and intimate objects then became important conveyers of many forms of knowledge--ritual, artistic, social, scientific, and religious--and spurred the spread of visual knowledge of Indic Buddhism to distant lands. By taking color as the material link between a vision and its artistic output, Garland of Visions presents a paradigm-shifting material history of Indian painting.