Guanyin as mediation: a new study on women’s Buddhist devotion in late imperial China

ABSTRACT This article discusses Yuhang Li’s illuminative study on laywomen’s Guanyin worship and their material practices: Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China. By developing a dialogue between three research fields – art history, Buddhism and gender studies – the book abounds with fascinating cases that unearth how Guanyin images were reproduced by female performance, skills, bodies and material artefacts. Here, Guanyin no longer appears as an established category or substance, but rather a mediation process involving the dialectical relationship between subject and object. Li’s writing departs from the traditional textual approach and veers into daily practices and material embodiments of Guanyin belief. Through the examination of significant contributions made by Li in the research on female Buddhist cults and religious material culture on a theoretical and historical level, this review emphasizes there is a heuristic perspective to inspect the mutually constructive relationship between worshipper and worshipped. In sum, the mimetic connection between laywomen and Guanyin observed by Li not only reflects female apostles’ Buddhist praxis beyond institutionalizations, but also offers a comprehensive picture of how laywomen’s subjectivity endowed by Guanyin faith negotiated with Confucian patriarchy in late imperial China.