January – 2020 – Art & Politics of East Asia

1/24 Jae-Yon Lee @ APEA

January 20, 2020jiayic Leave a Comment

Jae-Yon Lee

Associate Professor of Korean Literature, UNIST, Korea

Thematic Mapping of Kaebyŏk (The Opening, 1920-1926) and the Rise of the Prophetic Critic in Korea

Time: Friday, January 24, 3-5 pm

Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)

Discussant: Ethan Waddell (Ph.D. Student, EALC)

Friday, January 24, The Arts and Politics of East Asia (APEA) workshop is proud to host Jae-Yon Lee (Associate Professor, UNIST, Korea), who will present his book chapter “Thematic Mapping of Kaebyŏk (The Opening, 1920-1926) and the Rise of the Prophetic Critic in Korea ” He summarizes his chapter as follows:

This talk is about part of the book manuscript I am working on, Networking the Repetition: Formation of Collective Authorship through 1920 Korean Magazines. For situating the chapter better, I spare the first part of the talk to briefly outline the book. It aims to revisit the seemingly meaningless lexical, literary, and social repetitions in literary production, and examine how 1920s magazines mediated those patterns to shape the process of collective authorship-making, during the formative years of modern literature in Korea. In the second part, I trace the rise of the particular author figure, the prophetic critic, through the general interest-magazine for intellectual masses, Kaebyŏk (The opening, 1920-1926) by means of both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The latter approach particularly includes topic modeling, among others, as a means to investigate the semantic relations of the words in question and their co-occurring words based on a probabilistic model. The focus here is how quantitative methods can stretch our understanding of the magazine’s proto-leftist literature to connect its ideas about the Ch’ŏndogyo (the Heavenly Way religion) and to those of social reforms.

Refreshments will be provided. We look forward to seeing you at the workshop!

Jiayi Chen and Sabine Schulz
Co-coordinators, Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop

Protected: Jae-Yon Lee’s paper

January 20, 2020jiayic

1/17 Yuanxie Shi @ APEA

January 13, 2020jiayic Leave a Comment

Yuanxie Shi

PhD Student, EALC

Divination for “Alternative” Healing:

A Preliminary Study on Divination Medicine in the Long Twentieth Century China

Time: Friday, January 17, 3-5 pm

Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)

Discussant: H.S. Sum Cheuk Shing (PhD Student, EALC)

On January 17, The Arts and Politics of East Asia (APEA) workshop is proud to host Yuanxie Shi (Ph.D. Student, EALC), who will present her paper “Divination for ‘Alternative’ Healing: A Preliminary Study on Divination Medicine in the Long Twentieth Century China.” She summarizes her paper as follows:

“This paper examines the practice of yaoqian or divination medicine based on a close reading and comparison of the woodblocks collected from Hunan Province and Suzhou in Jiangsu Province during the long twentieth century.

Though the divination for healing is regarded as a popular religion similar to demonic divination or divining for family affairs, I would argue that yaoqian in my sample is distinct in its content. A discovery of possible sources of medical knowledge reveals how vernacular healing tried to incorporate the popular medicinal knowledge into its business and how minor schools of medicine together with vernacular practices have been overlooked and excluded from what is nowadays known as the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

Though TCM has been regarded as the orthodox and prior way of medical practice, for people in rural China throughout the long twentieth century or even earlier, due to various possible reasons (e.g. inaccessibility to doctors or modern Western medicine, efficacy of any healing methods), what methods they would choose to use in their everyday practice questions what we might perceive as the priority and the alternative. For many Chinese, all means serve the same end. The paper implies that there is no absolute priority or alternative: multiple methods of healing coexisted in China. ”

Refreshments will be provided. We look forward to seeing you at the workshop.

Jiayi Chen and Sabine Schulz

Co-coordinators, Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop

Protected: Yuanxie Shi’s Paper

January 13, 2020jiayic

1/16 Sohye Kim @ APEA

January 13, 2020jiayic Leave a Comment

Sohye Kim

(Postdoctoral Weinberg Fellow, Northwestern University)

“Crossing Borders of Memory: The Making of Transnational Post/memory in Zhang Lu’s Films”

2:00-4:00pm, Classics 312

*Please note the special date and location*

On January 16th from 2:00pm to 4:00pm the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop will host Sohye Kim (Postdoctoral Weinberg Fellow, Northwestern University). She will deliver a mock job talk titled “Crossing Borders of Memory: The Making of Transnational Post/memory in Zhang Lu’s Films.” Sohye provides the following abstract:

Zhang Lu (1962-) is one of the most emblematic diaspora filmmakers in South Korea today. In the six feature films which he released between his debut in 2004 and 2009, Zhang portrayed ethnic Koreans across China, Korea and Mongolia who are pushed by inexorable forces to the peripheries of, and boundaries between nation-states. However from 2012 to 2018, Zhang set his films exclusively in South Korea, his ancestral homeland to where he had relocated from his home in China. As both spatial and thematic departures for the director, films such as Scenery (2013), Gyeongju (2014), Love and…(2015), A Quite Dream (2016), and Ode to the Goose (2018) refrain from explicit portrayals of the diasporic issues that had surfaced prominently in his earlier works. This talk examines how Zhang’s “South Korean” films negotiate the formation of national culture in the homeland and in turn, how they uncover new forms of transnational practices through cinematic imagination and spectatorial experience. Specific focus is placed on Zhang’s articulation of his own diasporic history in relation to collective memories surrounding South Korean film culture and the internalized notion of border, from the physical border between the nation-states toward the metaphoric boundaries of human beings and their memories. The talk demonstrates how the audience’s temporal experience and memorialization of cinematic texts is intensely interwoven with the director’s memory. On this communal ground, I argue, Zhang’s films illuminate the mutually constitutive and dialectical relationship between national film culture and diasporic filmmakers, and in doing so, become a potential site of transnational postmemory.

There is no pre-circulated paper for this talk. Refreshments will be served at the workshop. We look forward to seeing you there!

2020 Winter Quarter Schedule

January 13, 2020jiayic Leave a Comment

The Arts and Politics of East Asia Workshop (APEA) is pleased to announce the Winter 2020 schedule. Unless otherwise noted, the workshop meets alternate Fridays from 3:00-5:00pm in Room 319 at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) in the Harris School building (1155 E 60^th St).

Winter 2020 Schedule

1/16/20 (Thursday) – Sohye Kim, Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University

Mock Job Talk: “Crossing Borders of Memory: The Making of Transnational Post/memory in Zhang Lu’s Films”

*Please note the special date and location*

Location and time: Classics 312 – 2:00-4:00pm

1/17/20 (Friday) – Yuanxie Shi, PhD Student, EALC

“A Preliminary Study in Chinese Divination Medicine in the Long Twentieth Century”

Discussant: H.S. Sum Cheuk Shing, PhD Student, EALC