China

We cordially invite you to join us on Friday, Jan 31, at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152 for the second VMPEA workshop this winter. The workshop features:

Yifan Zou

PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“In the Folds of Dynastic Models: Building and Re-Building of Iconic Towers” 

Discussant: Zhiyan Yang

Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows | Collegiate Assistant Professor, UChicago

This workshop will take place in-person only. Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

The Tragic Destruction of a Historic Site (guji yunwang 古蹟雲亡), depicting the Yellow Crane Tower on fire. Lithograph by Wu Youru 吳友如, from Dianshizhai Huabao, 1884

Abstract:

At the current sites of the “Three Iconic Towers of Jiangnan (江南三大名樓)”—a concept I argue emerged during the late Ming—there is a consistent visual strategy of showcasing building history through architectural models, typically featuring one model per Chinese dynasty since the tower’s establishment. These models present a polished and unified appearance of the towers within each dynasty. In contrast, premodern Chinese records, such as local gazetteers and inscribed steles, document numerous repairs and reconstructions, revealing significant variations in a tower’s architectural form within a single dynasty. Meanwhile, while contemporary architectural models emphasize key moments of the towers’ physical existence, repair and reconstruction records provide a broader cultural perspective, addressing the challenges of incompleteness and even absence throughout history.

Considering these discrepancies between contemporary displays and premodern records, my presentation revisits the building sites and textual records with four objectives: first, to assess the consistency of terms used to describe repairs and reconstructions in ancient Chinese records; second, to investigate how textual records of “Three Iconic Towers of Jiangnan” reflect the visions and principles guiding reparative efforts within their respective geographical contexts; third, to examine how each site’s long history was framed within individual repair or reconstruction campaigns in premodern China; and finally, to explore how the 1942 reconstruction plan for the Pavilion of Prince Teng (滕王閣), proposed by the Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture (中國營造學社), intersects with the trends and inquiries shaping Chinese architectural history as an emerging field in the early 20th century.

Bio:

Yifan Zou is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and a Provost Dissertation Completion Fellow. As a historian of Chinese art, architecture, and visual culture, she has a particular interest in the interplay between works of art and the built environment from around 1000 CE to the end of the Qing dynasty. She is currently completing her dissertation, Iconic Towers in Chinese Art and Visual Culture, which examines the development of iconic towers (minglou 名樓) as cross-media phenomena encompassing building practices, painting, literature, illustrated books, and decorative objects from the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) to contemporary China. In addition to her work on Chinese art, she has published an article and translated a book on Mesoamerican art.

Zhiyan Yang (he/him) is an architectural historian whose research spans the art and cultural history of the built environment in East Asia in the long twentieth century, the intersection of non-Western traditions and modernism, the theory and historiography of Chinese architecture, contemporary art and visual culture in East Asia, and diasporic architecture. His work includes a book-in-progress, Culture in Revolution: Contemporary Chinese Architecture and Its Public Discourse, 1978-2008, which draws on a diverse range of built, visual, and textual evidence to explore the cultural shifts in post-Mao Chinese architecture. Yang completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He is currently the Harper Schmidt Fellow in Society of Fellows and Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago.

We cordially invite you to join us this Friday, Jan 10, at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152 for the first VMPEA workshop this winter. The workshop features:

Yuanxie Shi

PhD Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations | CSGS Residential Fellow, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Beyond Rural and Urban Material Cultures: Tributes and Gifts in Socialist China” 

Discussant: Erica Warren

Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, UChicago

This workshop will take place in-person only. Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

The production team with the embroidered panel commemorating the 10th anniversary, 1959. Private Collection.

Abstract:

Social and economic historians of the People’s Republic of China have long debated the nature of Socialist China’s economy: Was it predominantly socialist, leaning towards capitalist, or a hybrid of both? One strand of this debate has focused on socialist material cultures, with scholars identifying at least two distinct material cultures within the rural-urban divide. This research, however, seeks to illuminate a third realm encompassing socialist tributes, diplomatic gifts, and certain customized luxuries. By examining a specific tribute—an embroidered panel made during the Great Leap Forward by a large group of female lacemakers and embroiderers from Chaozhou—this study explores the extent to which this relatively small realm of material culture represents a continuation of the imperial/state workshop tradition.

Bio:

Yuanxie Shi is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and a CSGS Residential Fellow, specializing in the intersections of labor and women’s history, political economy, technology, and material culture. Her dissertation, “Mao’s Clever Hands: Export Lacemaking and Socialist Flexibility in the Cold War, 1949-1980s,” explores an uncharted history of socialist industrialization since 1949 and during the Cold War. Rather than focusing on mechanical manufacturing and factory settings, her research examines mass production through labor-intensive needlework by millions of Chinese women, primarily in rural areas. This project reveals the subaltern status of rural women and bridges an overlooked social category in both the socialist hierarchy of values and the international division of labor.

Erica Warren is a curator and scholar with over ten years’ experience working with collections, in museums, and teaching. She is currently an assistant instructional professor in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago and the co-founder of The Craft Chronicle, an interactive digital humanities project that further elucidates and visualizes the interconnectedness of craft practice across the United States throughout the twentieth century and beyond. In 2025, Erica will be a Lenore G. Tawney Foundation Fellow. Erica’s area of specialization within decorative arts and design histories centers on the nineteenth century through the present day with a focus on alternative modernisms. Within this broad expanse, her research pursuits include the human and ecological costs that attended industrial innovations in modern textile production; color theory, synthetic dyes and modernists with intermedial art practices; the American designer, entrepreneur, and weaver Dorothy Liebes; the historiographies of modern craft and design; and the unbounded, yet materially specific, practices of contemporary artists.

From 2016-2022, Erica was a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, where her exhibitions included Bisa Butler: Portraits, Weaving beyond the Bauhaus, Super/Natural: Textiles of the Andes, Music and Movement: Rhythm in Textile Design, Making Memories: Quilts as Souvenirs, and Modern Velvet: A Sense of Luxury in the Age of Industry. Prior to her tenure at the Art Institute, Erica was a curatorial fellow in the Department of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture and a research assistant in the Department of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she curated the exhibition The Main Dish. Erica has taught courses at the University of Chicago, Drexel University, and the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She earned her PhD in Art History from the University of Minnesota and has participated in the Attingham Summer School.

We cordially invite you to join us this Friday, Dec 13, at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152 for our last VMPEA workshop this fall. This workshop features:

Wang You

Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows | Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Dike Dynamics: Farmers, Scholars, and Polder Design in Jiangnan, 1400-1810” 

Discussant: Lucien Sun

PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

This workshop will take place in-person only. You can also find the pre-circulated paper here (password: dike).

Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

All the best,

Lucien and Taylor

Polder illustrations in Wang Zhen’s Agricultural Treatise (Nongshu), first published in 1313. Library of Congress.

Abstract:

Since at least the eleventh century, scholars in Jiangnan had debated over the best measure to engineer local waterscape. In its lowland, polders—arable land enclosed by dikes—were crucial to protect rice paddies from flooding and ensure agricultural harvest and economic prosperity. How to build dikes and optimize polder structure, thus, generated intensive scholarly attention.

By juxtaposing three hydraulic manuals, this study examines scholarly efforts to explore and promote proper dike-building techniques in Jiangnan’s lowland between roughly 1600 and 1850. In particular, it investigates two analytically distinctive but practically intertwined approaches to produce agricultural knowledge and build dikes—the external approach advanced by Confucian statesmen and the communal approach by some residential landowners. In the former approach, external authorities viewed rural communities as part of the problem and attempted to impose strict and universal dike standards over “lazy farmers” and discipline farmer-laborers via compulsory official powers. With hydraulic experiences accumulated over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rural communities informed a communal turn in scholarly knowledge production by the turn of the early nineteenth century. Refusing hydraulic standards set by external authorities, this communal approach to hydraulic know-how trusted farmers with their in situ knowledge and critical skills as best able to govern their own water systems; the faceless “idle” farmers in the earlier agronomic and hydraulic discussions were transformed into active agents of knowledge with relevant experience in waterscape management.

Bio:

Wáng Yōu 王悠 (she/they) is an economic and environmental historian of early modern and modern China. Her current book project, Collaboration amidst Conflict: Rural Communities and the Making of a Sustainable Waterscape in the Lower Yangzi Delta, 1500-1950, examines the everyday interactions of village women and men with water- and landscapes in China’s economic center through hydraulic institutions, agricultural knowledge production, and a gendered labor regime. She is also interested in continuing exploring the intertwinement of the environment, gender, and the market through the lens of vernacular religion and global trade.

Before coming to the University of Chicago as a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Division, she received her doctoral degree in History from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2022. She is also an alumna of the University of Chicago (A.M. ’14) and Zhejiang University (Bachelor of Economics ’12).

Lucien Sun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. His dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between regional space and the visual culture of southern Shanxi in north China between the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. His most recent article centers around a woodblock print of Guan Yu excavated in Khara-Khoto and its connection to the vibrant regional visual culture of southern Shanxi. He is also interested in the art of book and how picture in its broad sense moved across space, borders, and visual media in medieval Eurasia. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Fudan University, Shanghai. In 2017–18, he was a Sumitomo Corporation visiting student at the University of Tokyo studying Japanese collections of Chinese and East Asian art. This year, he is working as the COSI Rhoades Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago.

We cordially invite you to join us next Friday, Nov 8, at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152 for our second VMPEA workshop this fall. This workshop features:

Yuzhe Cao

MAPH 2nd Year, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“The Transcendent Landscape: Xu Daoning’s Fisherman and the Scholar-Official Viewers in the mid-Northern Song Dynasty” 

Discussant: Wei-Cheng Lin

Associate Professor of Art History and the College, UChicago

This workshop will take place in hybrid format. For those who would like to join online, please register here.

Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

Xu Daoning, Fisherman, handscroll, ink and slight color on silk, 48.26 × 225.4 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Abstract:

Xu Daoning 許道寧 (ca. 970-1052), a landscape artist active in the mid-Northern Song era, received considerable respect from both art critics and scholar-officials in his day. Nonetheless, the existing scholarship has often discussed Xu’s works from the perspective of the Li-Guo landscape lineage. Despite this recognition of his connection to Li Cheng 李成 (ca. 919-967), Xu Daoning remains a less studied figure in the history of landscape painting in current works, particularly in comparison to Li and Guo Xi 郭熙 (ca. 1000–1090). However, a close examination of his most celebrated work, Fisherman’s Evening Song 漁舟唱晚圖 (hereafter Fisherman), painted around 1050, reveals that it transcends mere imitation of Li Cheng’s artistic styles. Its unique chronotope reflects the distinct social and cultural milieu of its time.

This paper explores the interplay between Xu Daoning’s Fisherman and its special intended audience in the mid-Northern Song Dynasty, namely the scholar-officials/literati. I argue Fisherman resonates deeply with the cultural landscape of the contemporary scholar-officials. Following a short biography of the artist himself, the paper will analyze three aspects of the painting: the progressively-viewed handscroll, the sacred mountain, and the prominent figures. In the last section, I will examine how the culture of landscape poetry and mental reclusion fostered under the reign of Emperor Renzong 宋仁宗 (r. 1022-1063) might have contributed to the unique illustration of the landscape within Fisherman. Ultimately, this analysis aims to illuminate how the painting reflects the literary and philosophical trends embraced by scholar-officials during the mid-Northern Song era.

Bio:

Yuzhe Cao is a second-year MAPH student at the University of Chicago, studying medieval and pre-modern Chinese art, with a focus on tomb art and landscape paintings. He received his BA in history from the Ohio State University. He is interested in exploring the narrativity across different art mediums and how difference in materiality would affect the selection of various visual motifs.

Wei-Cheng Lin specializes in the history of Chinese art and architecture with a focus on medieval periods. His primary research interests concern issues of visual and material culture in Buddhist art and architecture and China’s funerary practice through history. He is the author of Building a Sacred Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount Wutai (University of Washington Press, 2014). He has additionally published on a variety of topics, including collecting history, photography and architecture, the historiography of Chinese architectural history, and contemporary Chinese art. Lin is currently working on two book projects: Performative Architecture of China explores architecture’s performative potential through history and the meanings enacted through such architectural performance. Necessarily Incomplete: Fragments of Chinese Artifacts investigates fragments of Chinese artifacts, as well as the cultural practices they solicited and engaged, to locate their agentic power in generating the multivalent significance of those artifacts, otherwise undetectable or overlooked. Lin is also the Faculty Director for the Dispersed Chinese Art Digitalization Project (DCADP), a digital humanities initiative supported by the Cyrus Tang Foundation.

We cordially invite you to join us on Wednesday, May 1, at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152 for our next VMPEA workshop. This workshop features:

Sizhao Yi

PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Melancholic Things in Chen Hongshou’s Sixteen Views of Living in Reclusion” 

Discussant: Yun-chen Lu

Assistant Professor, History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University

This workshop will take place in-person. Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

Image: Chen Hongshou, Album leaf from Sixteen Views of Living in Reclusion, 1651. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Abstract:

In this talk, I will explore the affective effect of things in the visual repertoire of Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) through two paintings from the painter’s late masterpiece, the Sixteen Views of Living in Reclusion album. In these works, objects – a group of inkstones and a covered zither – are portrayed with rich yet peculiar details, interacting intimately with the figures. By closely attending to the pictorial details and analyzing them within the historical context,  I will suggest that these objects and their interactions with the figures delineate the nuances of the yimin sentiments towards the fallen Ming Dynasty among early Qing scholars. In fact, these objects are painted with such intentionality, subtlety and vividness that they visualize, materialize, and even animate the abstract mental state of melancholy. Through these objects, the viewer is not only reminded of but also let to reflect upon and even feel the past and its vestiges.

Bios:

Sizhao Yi is a PhD candidate specializing in the visual and material culture of Late Imperial China. Her dissertation engages with issues of material and materiality, image making, intermediality, and the agency of things through the lenses of Chen Hongshou’s artistic practices and his engagements with material artifacts. Prior to starting her PhD, she received a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Hong Kong, and an MA from the University of Chicago. She also interned at the textile conservation department in the Archaeology Institute at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She currently serves as the Rhoades Curatorial Intern and Frankenthaler/Taylor Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Yun-chen Lu is an Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at DePaul University. She specializes in Chinese painting and calligraphy, visual and material culture, artists with disabilities, and East Asian interregional art history. Her current research project investigates the relationship between artists with disabilities and the trend of artistic eccentricity in eighteenth-century Yangzhou, and the development of disability art and aesthetics in China. Before joining DePaul University in 2022, she was a predoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art.

We cordially invite you to join us on Wednesday, April 17, for the second VMPEA workshop of the quarter, taking place at our usual time at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152. This workshop will feature:

Elvin Meng

PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature & EALC, UChicago

Discussant: Peter Kornicki

Emeritus Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Cambridge

Visiting Professor, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Fragments into Voice into Fragments:

Manuscript Culture and the Nineteenth-Century Manchu Curriculum”

This event will take place in-person. For participants who would like to join via Zoom, please register here. Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you in CWAC 152!

Abstract

Drawing on a genre of Sino-Manchu manuscripts I frequently encounter in archival research, this presentation gives a preliminary sketch of the entanglements between materiality (the production, circulation, and consumption of print and manuscript texts), sociality (which can be pedagogical, bureaucratic, commercial, familial), and semiotics (translatability, orality, authenticity) in nineteenth-century Sino-Manchu language pedagogical practice. Although I will give my tentative reconstruction of the typical Manchu language curriculum in private bannered schools in late-Qing Beijing, the focus of my presentation will be on a single genre of students’ materials—collections of short, vernacular dialogues known in Manchu as meyen and in Vernacular Sinitic as huatiaozi 話條子—that young children copied, read aloud, and memorized from day to day in these schools. Certain collections of meyen were put to print throughout the Qing period, but the genre primarily circulated in the form of manuscripts, as they were constantly modified, exchanged, or written anew in classrooms, familial or friend circles, or the book market.

The proliferation of meyen in nineteenth-century Beijing manuscript culture, then, requires an analysis across multiple levels—material, textual, social, institutional, conceptual, etc.—that present challenges. The complication is increased by the fact that little is recorded of the historical use of meyen texts except on/as the extant meyen artifacts themselves. As I am in the early stages of thinking through this genre of manuscripts, this talk will focus on some basic but important questions: What are their typical material features? What was their place in Manchu language education, which was in effect an education in Sino-Manchu translation? What did their readers do with them? What can be known about their production and circulation? In asking these questions, I will be led to also investigate the place of meyen in the conceptual-material ecology of Manchu writing at large, as the meyen genre played an important role in the Qing politicization of the texture, voicing, and history of language itself.

Bio

Elvin Meng is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research interests include intellectual history, media theory, translation studies, and early modern Northeast Asia.

Peter Kornicki is emeritus professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Cambridge and currently a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Languages, Scripts and Chinese Texts in East Asia (2018), Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain’s War with Japan (2021) and many other works.