Lee, Sonya S.

Sonya Lee is Assistant Professor of Chinese Art and Visual Culture at University of Southern California in Los Angeles (U.S.). She specializes in religious art and architecture of pre-modern China, with particular focus on the material culture of medieval Chinese Buddhism along the ancient Silk Road. Currently, she is completing a book entitled “Surviving Nirvana: Death and Transfiguration of the Buddha in Chinese Art,” in which she discusses how the Buddha’s absence was made into a simple yet powerful allegory of survival in pre-modern China through images of the Buddha’s nirvana.