Dear friends of VMPEA,
We cordially invite you to join us this Friday, April 18, at 4:45-6:45pm CT in CWAC 152 for a workshop featuring:
Stephanie S.E. Lee
Curatorial Fellow, Block Museum of Art | PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
Who will be presenting a paper called:
Making Yellow: Color Charts, Shiseido, and Asiatic Femininity in East Asian Works-on-Paper
With a response by:
Chelsea Foxwell
Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College, UChicago
This workshop will take place in-person only. Please see abstract and bios below.
We hope to see many of you there!
All the best,
Lucien and Taylor
Left: Shiseido Beauty Chart, Illustration and design likely by Yamano Ayao. 1936. Right: Photograph showing physical measurements of colonial Korean women at Hwasun-gun County, Jeollanam-do Province, taken during Japanese occupation period (1910-1945), glass slide. National Museum of Korea.
Abstract:
This paper follows the omnipresent yet fugitive Yellow in the early twentieth century realm: how can tracing the journey of Yellow–as cosmetic pigment, as racial-ethnic marker, and as a key vector in the fine arts–reveal about the concerns of East Asian femininity and empire? Through an examination of Wada Sanzō’s French color chart collection and eventual publication of A Dictionary of Color Combinations (1933-1934), the pharmaceutical and cosmetic conglomerate Shiseido’s Beauty Chart (1936), and contemporary writings—private and public—this work-in-progress makes a case for analyzing the art, design, and comparative imperial politics through Yellow. How was it conceptualized, how was it printed, and how was it discussed and understood during an embattled conceptualizations of race, ethnicity, and the modern self?
Bios:
Stephanie Seung Eun Lee (she/her) is an Art History PhD Candidate at Northwestern University studying the histories of print. She’s the 2024-2025 Graduate Curatorial Fellow at the Block Museum of Art, working on Helen Frankenthaler’s print oeuvre and her engagement with East Asian aesthetics. In 2023-2024, she was the Dangler Graduate Intern at the Art Institute of Chicago and a Forsyth Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Chelsea Foxwell is Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research specializes in Japanese art in a global context.
