Lothar Ledderose (born 12 July 1942 in Munich) is a German professor of the History of Art of Eastern Asia at the University of Heidelberg.
He then became a researcher at Tokio University's Oriental Cultural Institute (1973–1975) and at the Museum of East Asian Art in Berlin.
He has been a board member of the Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) and, in 1986, president of the ICANAS (International Congress of Asian and North-African Studies) in Hamburg He was fellow and visiting professor at a great number of academic institutions, among which should be mentioned: Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (1983–1984), Senior Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington (1990–1991), Slade Professor at the University of Cambridge (1992), Murphy Lecturer at the University of Kansas (1994), visiting professor at the Universities of Chicago (1996), Taiwan (1997) and Kyoto (1997), as well as Mellon Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1998) and Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2000–2001).
Professor Ledderose is editor of various academic journals, including "Arts Asiatiques" in Paris, "Meishushi yanjiu jikan" in Taipei, "Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities" in Stockholm and "Scuola di Studi sull'Asia Orientale" in Kyoto On the occasion of Ledderose's retirement in 2010, an international conference was held from 10 to 12 July at the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context" at Heidelberg University.
His Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (2000), which the Association for Asian Studies awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize for 2002), argues that modular or standardized production systems were the basis for a wide range of Chinese art, including bronzes, terra-cotta figurines, lacquer, porcelain, architecture, printing, and painting.