Alice Casalini wins 2022-23 Liu Cong Memorial Prize
July 3, 2023
The Center for the Art of East Asia is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2022-2023 Liu Cong Memorial Prize for the Best Essay on East Asian Art and Visual Culture is Alice Casalini. The Center Steering Committee congratulates her for her essay, “Exposing a visual system: religious experience in the central pillar caves of Kucha.”
This well-argued and thoroughly researched paper offers a new interpretive angle on the Buddhist caves of Kucha, at the northern border of the Taklamakan desert. It considers the central pillar caves' architectural features and religious iconography in tandem with what can be posited about individual visitors' devotional practice at the time of construction.
The Liu Cong Memorial Prize recognizes excellent scholarship in East Asian art and visual culture by graduate students at the University of Chicago and encourages the developing of writing skills for publishable essays. The Center for the Art of East Asia established the prize in 2010-11 in memory of former graduate student and Ph.D. candidate in the Art History Department, Liu Cong (1979-2008), a promising young scholar much admired for her talent and vitality of mind and spirit who was struck down by brain cancer.
More about the Liu Cong prize
Art History Department profile of Alice Casalini
