Month: February 2019

Visual and Material Perspective On East Asia is proud to present Jeehey Kim, Postdoctoral Instructor, Department of Art History, University of Chicago, this Friday, March 1^st . Please notice the unusual time of the event: 5pm at CWAC 156.

Here are out speaker’s title and abstract:

 “Commemorating the Dead through Photography in East Asia.”

 “One can find ancestral portrait paintings of East Asia in museums, exhibitions, and even antique shows on television. Then, where are funerary portrait photographs to be found? They are at home, funerals, annual memorial services, as well as in national memorial halls, courts and protests on street. My project started with a question of “when and how was the commemorative use of portrait painting transformed into photographic medium in East Asia?” This paper draws upon my dissertation titled “Death and Photography in East Asia: Funerary Use of Portrait Photography,” which compares the practice of funerary photo-portraiture in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam by examining the basic concepts underpinning it. I argue that funerary portrait photographs signal the absent presence of the deceased, testifying to the existence of invisible ancestral spirits. The first part of this paper explores how the commemorative use of one’s likeness gave birth to funerary portrait photography, while the rest addresses the ways in which funerary portrait photography structures national identity and collective memory in East Asia.”

(The event is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago)

If you need assistance, please contact Dongshan Zhang: dongshan@uchicago.edu

Thank you.

Best wishes,

Dongshan

Visual and Material Perspective On East Asia is proud to present Yueling Ji, Ph. D student from Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, this Friday, February 8th. The time and venue is as usual: 4:30pm at CWAC 156.

Title: “Queering the Sino-Soviet Alliance Posters”

Abstract:

During the 1950s and under the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, artists from China and the USSR made a number of Sino-Soviet alliance posters. The posters typically portray the physical intimacy between a white Soviet man and a Chinese man. They hold hands, embrace each other, and care for the boys of the two countries. These posters resurfaced in internet communities of the early 2010s, as activists and fan artists from Philadelphia to Shanghai picked up on the visual language of mixed-race same-sex intimacy and kinship. The images were repurposed as a sort of communist homoerotic art, and widely circulated online as gay rights activism.

My project aims to track the two lives of Sino-Soviet alliance posters. Following the end of the Second World War, Sino-Soviet alliance posters ambitiously campaigned for masculinity, patriarchal lineage, and family building under socialism. But the unexpected role of Sino-Soviet alliance in gay rights activism today suspends the heterosexuality of historical socialist states, producing a fictional coalition between Cold War communism and Western liberalist sexual politics. It is with such a retroactively projected heritage that I hope to investigate socialist and neoliberal conceptions of family, sex, and race, and reevaluate the homonormativity of sexual politics today.

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Dongshan Zhang at dongshan@uchicago.edu

(This program is sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies)