Figuring Deities of Immortality across Media: A Storyworld for Birthday Celebrations

Abstract

This thesis examines a group of late imperial Chinese birthday-celebrating objects, including paintings, embroideries, and kesi tapestries, that feature remarkably consistent depictions of the Queen Mother of the West descending diagonally in from the upper corner toward a celestial gathering, where the Triad of Gods Happiness, Wealth, and Longevity, welcome her, along with the Eight Immortals scattered throughout the picture. Focusing on ten such examples from the Ming and Qing dynasties, this study argues that their shared layout, iconography, and compositional logic point to a larger system of visual production shaped by transmedial storytelling and collaborative practices. Rather than treating these works as isolated decorative artifacts, the thesis frames them as interconnected visual nodes in a broader “storyworld” of birthday celebration, immortality, and auspiciousness.

By analyzing how these images traverse different media, the study also investigates the audience, consumers, and producers of the objects, with a special focus on gender, to illustrate how they were used, circulated, and understood. Drawing from textual records, visual analysis, and material studies, this research emphasizes how repetition and familiarity structured audience engagement, allowing such images to circulate across gender, social strata, and different time frames. In doing so, the thesis contributes to current discussions of materiality, gender, and Daoist world-building in Chinese art history, offering new insights into the dynamics of folk auspicious imagery and its role in shaping collective imagination in the Late Imperial Period (1368-1911).