Author: campus

Yuhang Li

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

University of Chicago

Oneself as a Female Deity: Representations of Cixi Dressing as Guanyin

Friday, June 11, 4-6 pm

CWAC 156

Abstract

In recent studies of the cult of Guanyin or Avalokiteśvara, the most influential female deity in China, scholars have primarily examined how Guanyin was first introduced from India to China and gradually feminized in the process of sinicization.  However, people have overlooked how believers refashioned their own identity in response to the gendered transformation of Guanyin. My paper will attempt to ask this question by discussing the practices of elite lay Buddhist women reproducing representations of Guanyin via woman’s things and woman’s body in late imperial China.  I will focus on the practices of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), the actual monarch of Qing China, who had herself visually represented playing the role of Guanyin.  This paper will start with an examination of how Cixi, from a young age, had court painters draw portraits of herself as Guanyin and later when photography was introduced to China, she dressed up as Guanyin and was photographed as this deity. By looking at this case, we can grasp how Cixi represents her body in order to make it signify specific relations of gender and religion.  Moreover, she eventually mediates the production of her image through the modern technological form of the photograph, which involves new forms of spatiality.  Hence my paper will contribute to discussions about the reconstitution of space, religion, bodies and gender in modern China.

Michele Matteini

Visiting Instructor

Department of Art History

Oberlin College

“The Dream of the Southern City”: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Beijing’s Xuannan District

Friday, June 4, 4-6 pm

CWAC 156

Abstract

This presentation explores the social and artistic milieu of late eighteenth-century Beijing from the perspective of the émigré community of scholars, officials, and artists that settled in the Xuannan District. Because of its thriving antique and book markets, entertainment industry, and diverse population, the neighborhood of the Southern City had emerged as the capital’s new social and cultural hub, attracting students and scholars from all over the empire in search of official sponsorship and new possibilities for self-reinvention in its active scholarly circles. Concentration, diversity and mobility gave rise to a particular experience of the city that was celebrated in specialized literature and travel accounts.

Luo Ping (1733-1799) spent most of his late years in Beijing where he established himself as leading figure in an articulated network of patrons that included high-ranking officials, professionalized scholars, members of the Manchu nobility and foreign envoys. The landscape and studio paintings produced during this time outlined a ‘topography’ of alliances that coexisted and superimposed itself over the ongoing project of representing Beijing as the seat of the imperial power. I am interested in reconsidering Luo Ping’s paintings of Beijing through the lens of the particular life conditions of the Xuannan District and the contemporary emergence of poetry society, in order to understand the ways in which the appreciation of painting partook in broader processes of the elite’s self-definition and group-formation, in a time of tightened ideological control and political uncertainty.

Christina Yu

PhD Candidate

Department of Art History

University of Chicago

“Elegant Gathering: Late Yuan Literati Culture”

Friday, May 28, 4-6 pm

CWAC 156

Abstract

This presentation focuses on a social activity called “elegant gathering” (yaji), where scholars gathered in a garden to enjoy food and wine, compose poems, create paintings, and appreciate antiques.  Accompanied by those of similar educational backgrounds, literary and artistic interests, and experiences of survival at a turbulent time, participating scholars found sympathy and comfort in each other’s company.  Using their skills in poetry, calligraphy, and painting, late Yuan scholars were able to build a community defined by it cultural prestige.  This sense of belonging is especially meaningful for late Yuan literati who felt being alienated in the foreign ruled Mongol empire and insecure by the threat of wars.  Through case studies, I argue the existence of the community helped the scholars to construct an identity essential to their dignity and survival.

Wu Hung

Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College

University of Chicago

Inventing a “Chinese” Portrait Style in Early Photography:  The Case of Milton Miller (active 1850s-1860s)

Wednesday, May 26, 4.30-6.30 pm

CWAC 152

Co-sponsored with the Art & Politics of East Asia Workshop

Chelsea Foxwell

Assistant Professor of Art History and the College

University of Chicago

Copying/Nature: Notes from the Case of Nineteenth-Century Japan

Friday, May 7, 4-6 pm

CWAC 156

Abstract

Within East Asian art history, arguments about “naturalism” have developed in tandem with the awareness of representational fidelity’s prominence in the story of Western art. The roots of this view are partly historical: even prior to the nineteenth century, Japanese viewers often associated newly imported European pictures with mimetic priorities, contrasting them to the older modes of painting practiced in Japan.

Yet while “copying nature” is usually rated positively among today’s scholars and viewers, “copying” (other pictures) has remained ambivalent and undertheorized among viewers and scholars of Edo-period art. This paper will first evaluate some existing positions on copying/nature in the scholarship of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan in order to investigate the relationship between the two processes of “copying” and “copying nature.”

The second half of the presentation draws on my research from 1880s Japan and looks at the moment in which existing, Edo-period approaches toward painting (and copying) clashed with newly imported assertions that “Japanese paintings are nothing but copies of old paintings, and do not constitute painting as a fine art.”

Elizabeth Lillehoj

Associate Professor

Department of the History of Art and Architecture

DePaul University

“Politics and Ideology in Early Modern Japanese Visual Culture”

Friday, April 30, 4-6 pm

CWAC 156

Abstract

Visual culture functioned as an integral element in interactions between leaders of the imperial court and heads of warrior regimes at the outset of Japan’s early modern era (late 16th to early 17th centuries).  This was a critical time for both the imperial institution and the warrior government.  Emperors, who were still revered by many, faced financial straights and personal frustrations in adapting to a new order being established by ruling military lords, the most powerful and wealthy cohort in the country.  Leading warriors – first the head of the Toyotomi clan and then shoguns of the Tokugawa clan — depended on emperors, because only an emperor could bestow upon them the right to rule.  The two sides were thus caught in a dependent relationship with emperors needing economic support from warlords and warlords requiring sanction from emperors.  Taking advantage of an age-old imperial ideology, emperors and empresses managed to enhance the court’s inherited status.  It might even be said that imperial leaders preserved the court’s symbolically exalted place by redirecting initiatives formulated by warlords.  The story of that process, with strategic moves and counter-moves taken by each side, is inseparable from a history of art; indeed, art works deployed in emperor/warlord exchanges came to manifest the value of status and tradition.

Dr. Lei Yong

Palace Museum, Beijing

“Connecting Chains Built by Scientific Archaeology: Connections between China & the West in Western Zhou, Bronze & Ceramics in the Han Dynasty and Chang’an & Luoyang Tang Sancai”

Thursday, April 29, 4.30-6.30 pm

CWAC 156

Abstract

How, when, and where objects were made are questions that bridge together art, technology, and science. I will briefly introduce three cases about Chinese Faience in the Western and Eastern Zhou Dynasties, Hu pottery in Han Dynasty and Tang Sancai, focusing on archaeological interpretation.

Some Chinese beads might have been produced in the West 3000 years ago. I would like to look at why ceramics techniques in the Han Dynasty appear to have declined. Former research methodology on large ceramic human and animal figures in the Tang Dynasty might need to be revised due to the discovery of Tang Sancai.

Peggy Wang
PhD Candidate
Department of Art History
University of Chicago

“Debating New Mediums and Meanings in Contemporary Chinese Art in the 1990s”

Friday, April 23, 4-6 pm

CWAC 156

Abstract
In my paper, I trace how the problem of defining artistic meaning came to the forefront of the Chinese contemporary art discourse in the mid-1990s. This issue of how to locate and interpret meaning was prompted largely by the proliferation of new artistic mediums and formats from the 1980s onwards. During this period, artists not only adopted new materials and artistic interests, but also untethered themselves from previously established understandings about art and its historical legacy. In this paper, I focus on how this dynamic process of untethering took place at both artistic and epistemological levels. Through case studies, I will show how artists employed new materials and mediums to fracture the artistic process, destabilize meaning, and align themselves with a new history.

Risha Lee
PhD Candidate
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Columbia University

Constructing Community: A Shiva Temple in Medieval Southern China

Friday, April 16, 4-6 pm

CWAC 156

Abstract

13th century Quanzhou, a coastal city in Fujian province, might not appear the most obvious location for a permanent community of merchants from Tamil Nadu, south India. Even with modern ships, the roughly 4500 nautical miles that separate Tamil Nadu and Quanzhou are not traversed easily. Over 300 carvings, including a bilingual Tamil and Chinese inscription, however, found in the city and surrounding regions, attest that a group of Tamil merchants built a medium sized, south Indian style temple, devoted to the Hindu god Shiva in 1281. Though scattered references record Indian populations in southern China from the 8th century onwards, these carvings constitute the sole “text” for the Shiva temple’s existence and provide a fascinating micro-history of this community.
In this chapter from my dissertation, I examine the temple carvings, analyzing their form, and reconstructing the temple to show how the presence of multiple communities and active cross-cultural exchange facilitated its construction. Though past studies have remarked on the carvings’ Indic iconography and style, none have reconstructed the temple or its historical context. In this essay, I offer both, as well as a surprisingly short lifespan for the temple—built in 1281, it was destroyed little over a century later, in the late 14th century. In developing a chronology for the events that resulted in the temple’s creation and demise, I hope to shed light on this forgotten community, as well as the still poorly understood figure of the Tamil merchant.

Jonathan Reynolds

Associate Professor of Japanese Architecture and Photography
Barnard College/Columbia University

“The Young Female Urban Nomads ”: Imagined Migration through Tokyo in the Days before the Bubble Burst”

Friday, April 9, 4-6 pm

CWAC 156

Abstract

At the height of Japan’s economic bubble in the late 1970s and 1980s, certain architects, and merchants and their advertisers promoted a fantasy that Tokyo’s young female office workers, whose lives revolved around constant rounds of work, commuting and shopping, had become “urban nomads.” In her advertising posters placed in Tokyo commuter trains for the fashion department store chair Parco, the designer Ishioka Eiko invited young women to recognize themselves in startling photographs of “nomadic” women from India or north Africa. The architect Itô Tôyô proposed elegant yurt-like structures constructed of steel tubing and perforated metal panels covered with several layers of richly patterned translucent textiles for the use of these young “female urban nomads” as they roamed through the city. In an oddly complimentary fable told by the acclaimed novelist Abe Kobo, a middle class urban dweller abandoned his sheltered and privileged existence to inhabit a cardboard box in the streets. As startlingly different as these urban tales appear to be, they emerged out of the shared perception that life in the contemporary Japanese city had increasingly become a life of constant movement, a life on the street.