China

Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop presents

 Inside of the Crowd: Inquiring Qunzhong in Republican China

 Tie Xiao
Ph.D. Candidate
East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Chicago

Saul Thomas, Respondent

(PhD Candidate, Anthropology/History, University of Chicago)

May 28^th (Friday) 

3:00-5:00 p.m.

Judd Hall 313

5835 South Kimbark Avenue

Chicago, IL 60637

ABSTRACT: 

My dissertation studies various modes in which crowds were conceptualized and represented as well as their different aesthetic and political implications in early twentieth-century China. This chapter examines the rise of the discourse of crowd psychology in China. The decades from the 1910s to 1930s witnessed the expansion of the political field, as manifested in the incessant strikes and other mass demonstrations by an increasingly organized populace. The social phenomenon of the crowd fascinated modern Chinese intellectuals of a variety of ideological positions and political affiliations and became a mysterious object of various political, psychological and sociological investigations. Is there a reenergizing of consciousness in the moment of crowding or merely collective delusion? Is the action of crowding together a manifestation of self-awakening and self-determination or just a showcase of blind craze and primitive passions? What is the dimension of “in-common” that makes the crowd the mode of existence of being-in-common and, more pertinently, does this dimension of “in-common” qualify or disqualify the crowd as the source of political agency and authority? To answer these questions and understand the behavioral surface of “crowd phenomena,” Chinese crowd theorists studied the psychological interiority of the crowd mind and responded to the imported theories of crowd psychology by such authors as Gustav Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, William McDougall, and Everett Dean Martin. Through interacting with the transnational flow of crowd concepts, the new understanding of qunzhong as a socio-psychological category and concomitant political implications arose and circulated.

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates, please contact jiyoung22@uchicago.edu

Faculty sponsors: Michael Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene 

The workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Ji Young Kim (jiyoung22@uchicago.edu) or Ling Zhang (ling1@uchicago.edu)

Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop presents:

Inventing a “Chinese” Portrait Style in Early Photography:

The Case of Milton Miller (active 1850s-1860s)

Wu Hung

Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor

Art History and EALC

University of Chicago

Wednesday, May 26, 4.30-6.30 pm

CWAC 152
Cochrane-Woods Art Center
5540 South Greenwood Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637

Co-sponsored with the Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia Workshop 

Art and Politics of East Asia Presents:

Social Movement, Art, and the Contestation of Urban Space

– Rethinking Hong Kong’s Capitalism and Postcoloniality

(Please click here to read the paper)

Chunchun Ting

(PhD Candidate, East Asia Languages and Civilizations)

May 7 (Friday)

3:00-5:00 p.m.

Judd Hall 313

5835 South Kimbark Avenue

Chicago, IL 60637

Abstract:

This paper focuses on the social movement in pursuit of preserving Edinburgh Place Ferry Pier and Queen’s Pier in situ in 2006 and 2007. Looking closely at the political actions, discourses, and artistic expressions that took place at the two piers, I examine the movement’s challenge against Hong Kong’s deeply entrenched developmentalist ideology and the narrative of the Hong Kong people as an “economic animal”. On the one hand, the movement brought class analysis back in the discussion of urban planning, and, in calling for the working class’s right to the city, provoked a more general rethinking on capitalism and the questions of alienation and social justice. On the other hand, by re-articulating a marginalized history of political activism, it contested the colonial nature in official historiography, and set out to redefine the Hong Kong subject as political engaged. In this way, the movement contended that cultural preservation was not about the nostalgia for a bygone past, but the safe-keeping of history as a critical resource for the active re-imagining of a different future. Through a detailed reading of two live art performances and a poem titled “The Ballad of Queen’s Pier”, I also suggest that art does not only inform social movement but also becomes social action. If the commodification of space involves the abstraction and homogenization of space, art has a particular role to play in reopening space for the creation of diverse experience, multiple temporalities and spatialities, heterogeneous textuality and imagination, and thus reversing the process of commodification. And it is in this sense that esthetics becomes political at the two piers.

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates, please contact jiyoung22@uchicago.edu

Faculty sponsors: Michael Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene

The workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Ji Young Kim (jiyoung22@uchicago.edu) or Ling Zhang (ling1@uchicago.edu)

(Disorder/現在是過去的未來, Huang Weikai, China, 58 min, DVD,
2009)
2009 Young Jury Special mention Award of Cinéma du Réel,
France
Friday, March 5th, 2010, 3:00pm
CWAC 157
Cochrane-Woods Art Center, 5540 S. Greenwood Ave, Chicago

“At times the news is more dramatic than the movie.” This
is the theme and intent of Disorder. A mysterious and
dystopian contemporary city symphony, Disorder consists of
footage from a dozen amateur filmmakers, and weaves together
a series of striking observational scenes from the streets
of Guangzhou, including a madman dancing ecstatically in the
middle of the street, pigs running wildly on a highway, the
discovery of a cultural relic on a construction site, an
escaped alligator, and more. Together these scenes form a
grim study of rapid economic growth, the ensuing
urbanization and anarchy lurking behind ostensible order. As
the title says, it’s complete chaos and disorder. Between
the chilling, surreal content, creepy, grainy aesthetic and
disturbing lack of exposition, Disorder is captivating from
start to finish.

San Yuan Li (Ou Ning and Cao Fei, Cameraman: Huang Weikai,
40 min, DVD, 2003)

The subject of China’s explosive modernization has certainly
been much in the news lately, especially with the recent
Olympics. “San Yuan Li” confronts the issue head-on in a
portrait of a once-rural village that has been swallowed up
by the neighboring metropolis of Guangzhou, captured by the
artists and a team of assistants who fanned out across the
city with digital video cameras. Less documentary than
cinematic poem, it presents a kaleidoscopic picture of a
place that has fallen victim to voracious urban sprawl. Its
cameras start outside the city and its gleaming high-rises
and move inward, roaming San Yuan Li’s claustrophobic
streets and blind alleys before focusing on the faces of the
people who live there. This isn’t just a story about
infrastructure, but also humanity.

Huang Weikai graduated from the Chinese Art Department,
Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (China), and has worked as a
graphic designer and cameraman. He has been directing
independent films since 2002. His previous works include the
film short Laden’s Body Could Be Nothing but a Copy (2002)
and the documentary Floating (飄/Piao，2005). His filmography
as cameraman includes Meishi Street (煤市街) which received
an official invitation to the 10th International Istanbul
Biennial in Turkey in 2005, and San Yuan Li (三元里) which
was invited to Z.O.U., the 50th Venice Biennal in 2003.

Co-sponsored by Center for East Asian Studies and Art and
Politics of East Asia Workshop

Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop presents:

Revolutionary Aestheticism and Excess: Transformation of the Idealized Female Body in The Red Lantern on Stage and Screen

(Please click here to read the paper)

Ling Zhang

(PhD Student, Cinema and Media Studies)

With a response offered by

Max Bohnencamp

(PhD Candidate, EALC)

February 19 (Friday)

3:00-5:00 p.m.

Judd Hall 313

5835 South Kimbark Avenue

Chicago, IL 60637

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I take the revolutionary model opera film The Red Lantern (hongdengji紅燈記, 1970) as a case study, attempting to investigate the revolutionized modern Beijing opera’s assimilation and reinvention of traditional stage convention and Western theatrical and musical elements. Specifically, I trace the representation of the female body and its surrounding space in its double transformation in the film—that is, its transformation from the traditional to the modern and revolutionary, and from the stage to the screen. The excessively formalistic expression in the modern work may appear entirely distinct from traditional practice, in terms of performance formulas, setting, costume, theme, and so forth; however, I will demonstrate that the two share fundamental characteristics, and that Beijing Opera could serve as an appropriate art form to enhance revolutionary ideology. Although it emerged under extreme social, political, and culture circumstances, revolutionary model opera should not be regarded as an abrupt historical disruption or an isolated phenomenon, but as a continuation of an intention to reform and modernize traditional Chinese theater that already begun in the early twentieth century and persists on the contemporary Beijing Opera stage. The filmic version of The Red Lantern is based on an eponymous Beijing Opera stage production that had several precursors: a Shanghai Opera (huju/ 滬劇) version was derived from an earlier Beijing Opera version performed by the Ha’erbin Beijing Opera troupe and titled The Revolution Has Successors (geming ziyou houlairen/ 革命自有後來人); this was in turn adapted from the feature film The Revolution Has Successors (ziyou houlairen/ 自有後來人, 1963). After numerous rounds of transplanting and revision, The Red Lantern experienced a process of mystification, idealization, and sublimization, achieving a kind of formal and ideological excess. The film The Red Lantern is in no way a visual record or documentation of the stage performance. It conveys the qualities and spirit of the original work, and greatly heightens the grandeur and power already pervasive in the stage version by abundantly employing cinematic techniques such as indicative camera angles, fluent tracking shots, and the insertion of close-ups of faces, hands and objects in order to construct a plastic cinematic world. More significantly, the excessive revolutionary visual rhetoric presented by body movements, facial expressions and hand gestures, combined with the close-ups and the proximity between the camera and the human body, suggest a strong sense of the corporeality and materiality of the body on the screen. Furthermore, the direct and intimate means of presenting the characters’ loaded revolutionary passion and deep hatred towards the enemy make these emotions seem almost to penetrate the screen and impinge on the audience in an attempt to determine the spectator’s bodily and sensory perception of the film.

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates, please contact jiyoung22@uchicago.edu

Faculty sponsors: Michael Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene

The workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Ji Young Kim (jiyoung22@uchicago.edu) or Ling Zhang (ling1@uchicago.edu)

Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop Presents:

A Revolutionary Women’s Culture:

Re-writing Femininity and Women’s Experience in China,

1926-1949
 

A Mock Job Talk by Anup Grewal
Ph.D candidate, EALC

*PLEASE NOTE THE UNUSUAL TIME AND LOCATION

Tuesday, November 24
3:30-5:30 p.m.

HM 103
(William Rainey Harper Memorial Library

  1116 E. 59th St.)

The Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop is pleased to present:

“Iconoclasm in Self-Expression: Narratives of Love and Guilt”

(the third chapter from her dissertation, “Forbidden Enlightenment: Self-Articulation and Self-Accusation in the Works of Yu Dafu (1896-1945).”)

Valerie Levan

Ph.D.  Candidate

 Department of Comparative Literature

with a response by Scott Mehl (Ph.D student, Department of Comparative Literature)

October 23(Friday) 3:00-5:00 PM 

Room: Judd 313

A summery of  the second section of the paper (pages 20-35):

Section II. Modern Spirits. Modern Flesh?

This section begins with a brief discussion of the “conflict of spirit and flesh” ( ling rou chongtu) as it appeared in the critiques of Yu Dafu’s contemporaries.  First I explore the “conflict of spirit and flesh” as a foreign import that differs from traditional notions of passion/ritual, order (qing/li, li).   The paragraphs that follow are a brief “East-West” comparative discussion of the association of guilt with sex and romance.  I then use these two discussions – of the “conflict of spirit and flesh” and the association of guilt with sex and romance – as the basis for my theory of the modern Chinese male progressive’s romantic predicament circa 1920-1930.  I use Zhang Jingsheng’s (aka Dr. Sex) sexological studies and the famous Ms. Chen debate to illustrate this situation of an educated male public eager for information on modern romance and forced to function in a world of ill-defined romantic moral standards.  

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates, please contact jiyoung22@uchicago.edu

Faculty sponsors: Michael Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene

The workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Ji Young Kim (jiyoung22@uchicago.edu) or Ling Zhang (ling1@uchicago.edu)

The Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop invites you to attend:

Writing Ethnicity in Contemporary China:

A Conversation with Six Writers

We are going to discuss issues such as how these writers bring their own ethnic background into their writing in Chinese, how they deal with the relationship between artistic creation and politics in contemporary China, and so forth. Feel free to bring up related issues which interest you.

We are also going to show some short clips from the Chinese film “Green Tea” (lv cha, 绿茶), which is directed by Sixth Generation director Zhang Yuan (张元) and adapted from a short story written by JIN Renshun 金仁顺, one of the writers who will participate in the event.

Participants:

CAO Youyun 曹有云 (Poet, Tibetan ethnicity)
GUO Wenbin 郭文斌 (fiction writer and essayist from Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region)
JIN Renshun 金仁顺 (fiction writer and screenwriter, Korean ethnicity)
NIE Le 聂勒 (Han name 钟华强Zhong Huaqiang, poet and editor, Wa ethnicity)
WANG Hua 王华 (fiction writer, Gelao ethnicity)
HU Xuewen 胡学文 (fiction writer, Vice-President of Hebei Writers’ Association, Han ethnicity)

Interpreter:

Guo Li 郭丽 (Ph.D Candidate, Comparative Literature, University of Iowa) 

Moderator:

Paola Iovene (Assistant Professor in Modern Chinese literature, Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations, University of Chicago)

   October 12 (Monday) 3:00-5:00 PM

           Room: Cobb Hall 409

The discussion will be in both Chinese and English.  

Please download the writers’ biographies and writing samples (both in Chinese and English)

Biographies

cao youyun’s poem (Chinese) 

Guo Wenbin’s revised story_9_25 (English)

Guo Wenbin’s short story (Chinese)

Jin Renshun—In Dunhuang (English)

Jin Renshun’s short story (Chinese) 

Li Hui’s poems (Chinese)

Nie Le’s poem (Chinese)

Poetry with trans (both)

Wang Hua’s short story (Chinese)

Wang Hua’s tranlated text (English)

*If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates,  please contact jiyoung22@uchicago.edu
  

**Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance,  please contact Ji Young Kim (jiyoung22@uchicago.edu) or Ling Zhang (ling1@uchicago.edu)

The Art and Politics in East
Asia Workshop

Presents:

Poetry in Action:

The Narrativity of Oracular Poems in Southeast China’s Divination

Xueting Liu

Ph.D. Candidate

Anthropology

Friday, May 22
3:00-5:00 p.m.

Judd 313

Abstract:

To describe JinBang as a village of poetry might invite severe challenges if the concept of poetry is restricted to
elegant classical Chinese regulated verse or free verse rich in “literariness”. This southeastern Chinese village situates in southern Fujian, with tea industry as the 9000 residents’ main means of life. 20% villagers are illiterate according to the official statistics, and the fact that most of the villagers older than 30 speak only local dialect makes the classical Chinese poetry recitable only by the school children. Yet poetry in its broader definition, i.e. verse, is present in every household and at every street corner. JinBang villagers listen to the poetry read as lines in local drama including puppet theater, Xiang opera and Ge Zai opera; they receive temple oracles in form of poems in the village temple Xing Yi Dian; and poems and poetic images are even the source of lottery number guessing. Closely bounded with their idea of fate and history, the reading of poems remains a crucial position both in JinBang village life and in individual villager’s life history and calls for the reader’s reflexive understanding and creativity in
discovering the hidden meanings in texts and the hidden possibilities in the life history of the characters that poems depict.

In this paper, I will discuss the narrativity of temple oracular poems in JinBang and the temple divination
practice (Chou Chien) as its context, because as the intersection of poetic text and the concept of fate, the oracular poems sheds light on an understanding of the framework the villagers employ in viewing their life crises and historical events. There being no easy, formulaic solution to either the problem that the petitioner faces or the problem of interpretation that the diviner faces, divination in JinBang is an action against closure more than a calculation of determined fate. As an exercise of human agency based on the agency of words, Chou Chien stresses
on here and now more than why and how, whereas it also calls attention to a reinterpretation of history. Taking Chou Chien as a generative meaning-making and meaning grounding process both on the petitioner’s and the diviner’s sides, I follow a Bahktinian approach in describing the multivocality of oracular poems and the interactive process of selection and communication, and in taking Chou Chien as a responsive and communicative action. Emphasizing on the intertextuality of oracular poems, I will discuss the mosaic of quotations in poems and how the readers view the poems in reference of local drama. In the end, I will turn to a modern practice of lottery number guessing which employs a similar technique of text interpretation.

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates, please contact ktanaka@uchicago.edu

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please email Kathryn Tanaka at
ktanaka@uchicago.edu or Tomoko Seto at tseto@uchicago.edu