Oxford China Studies Society – Culture and Art Series

This talk will introduce the CIT (Chinese Iconography Thesaurus), the first alternative classification scheme especially designed for the Chinese visual culture, with a complementary image database. Traditionally, iconography has been used to index and access motifs, themes, and subject matters of European artworks. Because of the lack of alternative model, the contents of non-western art objects have long been catalogued according to Eurocentric classifications. The CIT, as an intellectual and practical project, aims to fill this gap