Yun-chen Lu, “A Left-Turn to Artistic Eccentricity: Gao Fenghan (1683–1749) and Disability Art in Eighteenth-century Yangzhou”

Please join us on Wednesday, May 3, from 4:45-6:45 pm CT at CWAC 152 for the fifth VMPEA Workshop this Spring, featuring:

 

Yun-chen Lu

Assistant Professor, Department of History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University

Who will be presenting:

“A Left-Turn to Artistic Eccentricity: Gao Fenghan (1683–1749) and Disability Art in Eighteenth-century Yangzhou”

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

4:45-6:45 pm CT

*Please use this link if you plan to join virtually. No registration is required. Password: “left.”

Gao Fenghan and Li Tianbiao, the first leaf of the Album of Painting and Calligraphy in Collaboration with Li Tianbiao, 1737. Album leaves mounted as a handscroll, ink on paper. Each leaf 31.5 × 35.4 cm. Chien-lu Collection.

 

Abstract

This talk focuses on Gao Fenghan (1683–1749) and the development of his disability art and aesthetics in premodern China. Scholars have categorized Gao as one of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, a group of artists who were active in southern China during the early Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) and gained renown for rejecting the Beijing court’s orthodox painting style in favor of their own aesthetic choices. Among these artists, Gao earned fame because of his left-handed style, which he developed after the paralysis of his right hand. I argue that this disability enabled him to move beyond his early practice in the dominant literati style and generate his own artistic idiosyncrasy, which was popular in the Yangzhou art market that favored nontraditional art. While scholarly discussion of disability in art history has focused on the evolution of modern aesthetics in Euro-American art, my project focuses on disability art in premodern China, not only challenging the dating of disability art studies but also expanding its geographical scope. More specifically, my research offers a new understanding of disability aesthetics rooted in Chinese culture, history, and philosophy.

 

Yun-chen Lu (Ph.D., UCSB) is an Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at DePaul University. She specializes in East Asian art history, particularly Chinese painting and calligraphy, material culture, literati culture, artists with disabilities, disability aesthetics, and East Asian interregional art history. She teaches courses on Asian art history, Chinese art history, and Buddhist 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 Chinese art.

Zhiyan Yang, “Exhibiting Contemporary Architecture of China: Experiments and Cross-Cultural Dialogues, 1995-2005”

Please join us next Wednesday, April 26, from 5–7 pm CT on Zoom for the third VMPEA workshop this spring, featuring:

 

Zhiyan Yang

PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper

“Exhibiting Contemporary Architecture of China: Experiments and Cross-Cultural Dialogues, 1995-2005”

Discussant: Meng-Hsuan Lee

PhD Candidate, Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

5:00–7:00 pm CT

*Please note that this is an online event and the unusual time. Please use this link to join the talk on Zoom. No registration is required. The password is “arch”.

Installation view of the New Urbanism: Pearl River Delta organized by Rem Koolhaas and graduate students from Harvard Graduate School of Design, Documenta X, Kassel, 1997.

 

 

Abstract

A renewed investment in displaying contemporary architecture of China emerged and destabilized the existing exhibitionary paradigm in the 1990s as a result of the country’s historic urbanization movement and the increasing engagement with international capital, information, and networks. The three case studies, New Urbanism: Pearl River Delta (1997), Cities on the Move I (1997), and the design proposal for the Times Museum featured in the Second Guangzhou Triennial (2005), examine a new sensitivity based on international and interdisciplinary interactions among architects, curators, artists, and institutions. Situating these examples within a perennial tension between exhibition as temporally and spatially confined cultural production and architecture as a more substantial and permanent medium within the urban environment, I argue that these exhibitions became loci of self-reflexive experimentation, through which contemporary Chinese architecture can be interpreted as a form of knowledge production, an on-site experience, and an agent to provide concrete social and cultural changes beyond the exhibition space.

 

 

Zhiyan Yang is a doctoral candidate specializing in the history of modern and contemporary East Asian Architecture. He received his BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2013 and MA from the University of Chicago in 2015.

 

Meng-Hsuan Lee 李孟瑄 joined the PhD program at Columbia in 2018. He studies modern architecture, with a focus on Japanese colonial architecture and urbanism in Taiwan. Using the framework of screen genealogies, his current project investigates the rise of façadism and urban media culture in Taiwanese cities during the Japanese colonial period, particularly in the 1920s and 30s. More broadly, he is interested in the intersection of architecture and media, global colonialisms, and architectural preservation. Prior to joining Columbia, Meng received his M.A. in Humanities (art history) from the University of Chicago, where he wrote his master’s thesis examining the politics of urban memory surrounding Shih-Shih South Village 四四南村, a controversial architectural preservation project in Taipei. Previously, he received his B.A. in Drama and Theatre from National Taiwan University, where he also worked as a scenic designer.

Wang Zonghui, “An Exploration on the spatial composition of the mKhar rdzong Cave in mKhar rtse Valley, mNga’ ris, Tibet”

Please join us on Monday, April 10, from 4:45 pm-6:45 pm CT for the second VMPEA workshop this spring, featuring:

 

Wang Zonghui

Visiting PhD Candidate, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper

“An Exploration on the spatial composition of the mKhar rdzong Cave in mKhar rtse Valley, mNga’ ris, Tibet”

西藏阿里卡孜河谷帕尔宗坛城窟图像程序研究

*This event will be conducted in English.

Discussant: Xiaotian YIN

PhD Candidate, Harvard University

Monday, April 10, 2023

4:45–6:45 pm CT, CWAC 152

*Please note the date change. You can also use this link to join the talk on Zoom. No registration is required. The password is “arth”

North wall of mkhar rdzong cave (Photo: Wang Ruilei)

 

 

Abstract

mKhar rdzong cave is a Buddhist site located on the cliff of rdzong mountain in the mnga’ ris Region of the Tibet Autonomous Region in China. Discovered by archaeologists from Sichuan University and the Cultural Relics Administration Committee of Tibet Autonomous Region in 1996 and 1999, the cave is renowned for its stupa relics and distinctive visual program, which includes unique mandalas and intact ceiling decorations. This makes it a valuable subject for art historical research. In my previous work, I established that the cave is a “relic stupa (gdung rten) cave” that was created as part of Buddhist monks’ funeral rituals. In this paper, I will examine the iconographical program of the cave’s murals and argue how they express the concept of deliverance from suffering by this program. Furthermore, I will explore possible sources for such a design structure. Through this analysis, I hope to contribute to our understanding of the spiritual and artistic significance of this remarkable cave and to the broader study of Buddhist art and ritual practices in the region.

 

Wang Zonghui is a PhD candidate at the Center for Buddhist Art, School of Art and Archaeology, Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. Her research focuses on Sino-Tibetan Buddhist art, with a particular interest in the Western Himalayas, especially the mnga’ ris district of China.

 

Xiaotian YIN 尹筱天 is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University specializing in Buddhist art in Inner Asia and China from the tenth to the fourteenth century. Her dissertation, “Collecting Embers: Buddhist Art in Central Tibet in the Age of Fragmentation, from the tenth to the twelfth century,” investigates the transcultural entanglements of Buddhist art across Central Tibet, Song China, Tangut-Xixa, Nepal, and India during Tibet’s “Dark Age.”. Xiaotian is also interested in the Buddhist publishing and printing culture in Song, Liao, Tangut-Xixia, and Mongol-Yuan states. In 2022-2023, Xiaotian is a visiting scholar and a lecturer in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College.

 

Hope to see many of you there,

Lucien Sun and Li Jiang

VMPEA Coordinators, 2022–2023

Juliane Noth, “Debating the Past and the Future of Chinese Art at the Hangzhou National Art School”

Please join us this Thursday, March 23, from 4:45 pm-6:45 pm CT at the Cochrane Woods Art Center (CWAC) 156 for the first VMPEA workshop this spring, generously sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with support from a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center Grant, featuring:

 

Juliane Noth

Professor of East Asian Art History, Freie Universität Berlin

Who will be presenting the paper

“Debating the Past and the Future of Chinese Art at the Hangzhou National Art School, 1928–1937”

*Please note the unusual date of this meeting. You can also use this link to join the talk on Zoom. No registration is required. The password is “arth”

Cover of the journal Apollo, no. 17 (1936), special issue on the graduation of the fourth class

 

Abstract

The Hangzhou National Art School was founded with the goal to establish a modern art education following the Beaux-Arts model and to realize the concept of “aesthetic education” envisioned by the minister of education, Cai Yuanpei. Most of the young faculty around director Lin Fengmian (1900–1998) had only recently returned from their own studies in France. Together they aimed at establishing a modern program for training artists in China. In the art school’s journal’s, they engaged in controversial debates about the situation of the Chinese artworld, about how to interpret the history of Chinese art, and how it could be saved for the future. I will discuss these debates together with the curriculum and the work within the studios of the art school, and outline how historiography and practice informed each other.

Juliane Noth is Professor of East Asian Art History at Freie Universität Berlin. The focus of her research is on twentieth-century Chinese art, on how it was redefined with regard to historical practices as well as global entanglements, and on its institutional frameworks. Her latest monograph, Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting, was recently published as a Harvard East Asian Monograph in 2022.

 

Hope to see many of you there,

Lucien Sun and Li Jiang

VMPEA Coordinators, 2022–2023

Ellen Larson, Nov 3

We invite you to join us at Ellen Larson’s VMPEA talk this Thursday (Nov 3), from 5-7pm. The talk will be hybrid, at CWAC 152 and livestreamed. We hope to see many of you there!

 

Ellen Larson

CAEA Postdoctoral Instructor of Art History, UChicago

who will present the paper

“Spectral Ecologies: Post-Industrial Urban Aesthetics in Northeast China”

on Thursday*, November 3, 2022

from 5:00 – 7:00 pm CST* in CWAC 152.

Register here if you wish to join us remotely.

*Please note the unusual date and time

 

Abstract:

Since the turn of the 21st century, multimedia artists and filmmakers from China have employed the moving image as a tool to capture temporalities shaped by urban-industrial decline in northeast China. A counterpoint to massive economic prosperity within the Pearl River Delta, fueled by investments in new technologies and industries, this region, termed Dongbei in Chinese, has witnessed the dismantling of socialized production, along with the transformation of once thriving factory complexes into largely abandoned ghostly spaces. In this paper “Spectral Ecologies: Post-Industrial Urban Aesthetics in Northeast China” artists Hao Jingban, Wang Bing, and Wang Mowen reference the ghosts of cultural memory through distinctive visual presentations of bygone monumentalities from China’s socialist past, including grand memorials to Chairman Mao and other iconic forms of early PRC-era infrastructure, both physical and ideological. I propose that these artists incorporate what writer and critic Chris Berry has referred to as “on-the-spot realism,” (jishizhuyi) a term which incorporates site-specific observational cinematic realism to document occurrences within artists’ everyday surroundings. “Spectral Ecologies” contemplates how particularities within bygone centers of industrial-driven labor have influenced time-based works over the past two decades. Collectively, Hao Jingban, Wang Bing, and Wang Mowen activate the moving image as both archive and research method. They gesture towards geo-agencies somewhere in between the past and the future, the living and the non-living. Most significantly, they document the ruined decay of northeast factory zones, summoning the metaphorical ghosts of this regions’ industrial history.

Wang Mowen, Trinity, 2019, single-channel video, 16 mins., 9 secs.

 

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Ellen Larson is a Center for the Art of East Asia (CAEA) Postdoctoral Instructor in conjunction with the Department of Art History. Her research underscores the nature of temporalities as represented in moving image art made primarily in Mainland China. She is particularly interested in revealing how contemporary artists capture facets of accelerated time all the while living in a culture where physical environments and social connections are becoming increasingly obsolete due to major investments in robotics, AI technologies, online communication platforms, and virtual monetary exchange applications. Ellen’s research is also informed by urban studies, Asian futurisms, memory studies, and cyberfeminism studies. Her methodological approach to the study of art history incorporates curation and design as critical forms of applied practice. Before joining UChicago, she earned her PhD in art history from the University of Pittsburgh. Her doctoral dissertation, “On Time: Contemporary Chinese Video Art from China,” focused on emerging video and new media art since the turn of the new millennium. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Dunhuang Foundation. She also holds a master’s degree in modern Chinese history from Minzu University of China (Beijing), where she completed all coursework in Chinese.

Nancy Lin, Oct 26

Please join us next Wednesday for the first VMPEA event of this academic year, featuring:

Speaker: Nancy P. Lin

Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell University

Wildlife (1997-1998), a Multi-sited Art Activity”

Discussant: Ellen Larson

CAEA Postdoctoral Instructor of Art History, UChicago

 

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

4:45–6:45 pm CT, CWAC 152

For those who desire to attend remotely, please use this link to register for the Zoom meeting. 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

The password to this zoom session is 043582

Catalogue for Wildlife: Starting from 1997 Jingzhe Day (1997-1998)

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s artists from all across China turned from creating works within the studio and museum context to working directly on-site in everyday spaces. Examining the year-long, multi-sited art project Wildlife (1997-1998) organized by Beijing-based artist Song Dong and featuring twenty-seven artists across seven cities, this paper explores how the activity brought these disparate art practices together to advance a discourse for the first time around the aims of working on-site. It shows how the experimental project promoted art practices that were intimately tied to everyday locales and audiences and how it pioneered new strategies for exhibiting and disseminating such site-based works to broader audiences across China. By examining works by participating artists as well as Wildlife itself as a creative work, the paper reveals the ways in which artists in the second half of the 1990s converged on an expanded understanding of on-site art practice as both thoroughly local and transregional.

 

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Nancy P. Lin is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese art and architecture with a particular interest in the relationship between art and urbanism. Studying contemporary Chinese art through a transregional perspective, her current book project examines locally situated, yet globally oriented site-based art practices in China during the 1990s and early 2000s. It explores the aesthetic and socio-political stakes for how and why artists during this period began to work “on-site” in everyday urban spaces such as city streets, construction sites, and other unconventional locations. She is also at work on a new project that explores the history of performance art in China and East Asia. Incorporating materials from Cornell’s Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-garde Art, this project considers the documentary mediation of performance art and issues surrounding performative action’s (in)visibility, duration, and public impact. Lin’s publications include a forthcoming article in Art Journal, a chapter in the edited volume The Allure of Matter: Materiality Across Chinese Art (Smart Museum of Art, 2021), and an article in the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Intellect, Winter 2021).

Ellen Larson is a Center for the Art of East Asia (CAEA) Postdoctoral Instructor in conjunction with the Department of Art History. Her research underscores the nature of temporalities as represented in moving image art made primarily in Mainland China. She is particularly interested in revealing how contemporary artists capture facets of accelerated time all the while living in a culture where physical environments and social connections are becoming increasingly obsolete due to major investments in robotics, AI technologies, online communication platforms, and virtual monetary exchange applications. Ellen’s research is also informed by urban studies, Asian futurisms, memory studies, and cyberfeminism studies. Her methodological approach to the study of art history incorporates curation and design as critical forms of applied practice. Before joining UChicago, she earned her PhD in art history from the University of Pittsburgh. Her doctoral dissertation, “On Time: Contemporary Chinese Video Art from China,” focused on emerging video and new media art since the turn of the new millennium. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Dunhuang Foundation. She also holds a master’s degree in modern Chinese history from Minzu University of China (Beijing), where she completed all coursework in Chinese.

Ranxu Yin, June 1

Speaker: Ranxu Yin (visiting graduate student)

“Re-Presencing the Past? Rethinking the Exhibition History Behind the Object’s Lives and Human’s Experimental Interactions in Premodern China”

Wednesday, June 1st 2022

4:45 – 6:45 pm CT, Hybrid event (In-person at CWAC 152 + livestream via Zoom)


※online: Please use this link to register for the zoom meeting. password: museum61

※For this event, we will be having dinner after the talk. For those who would like to join this gathering after the event, please complete this form by Sunday (May, 29th) 11:59 p.m. so that we can order enough food for everyone.


These photographs serve as examples of the different lives of objects in museums and in the places where they have been rediscovered. 20221968

Abstract

 This presentation will start with the social lives of objects and the corresponding human experiences with them, raising the possibility of incorporating some pre-modern ritual experiences into the history of exhibitions. For example, collective human experiences in tombs and temples (or caves) to a great extent share the same “media system” with the contemporary exhibitions, including objects, spaces, information, and emotions. In all three spaces, one finds a similar touching relationship between humans and the mediums described as “contemporary inter-built relationship,” opposite to the “temporary encounter relationship.” In this light, collective human experiences with “exhibitionary spaces” are closely connected across time and space. I propose this connection to be one of the responses to the issue of “re-presencing the past” in media archaeology, prompting us to reconsider or redefine “exhibitions” as a concept and space for staging the human experiences.

 I will use the ritual processes in the tombs and human religious experiences in the temples/caves,focusing on the display of objects and the structures of corridors, as the primary cases of analysis for this presentation.

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Ranxu Yin is currently a visiting graduate student in the Department of Art History, the University of Chicago. She is a PhD student in the School of Humanities at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China, where she majored in art museology. Ranxu studied visual culture and received her MA from CAFA. She is interested in the theories and methods that art history studies absorb and transform from media research of cultural studies. Her research mainly deals with the interactions between art history studies and the history of museum and exhibition.

Yan Jin, May 18

Speaker: Yan Jin (Ph.D. student, University of Chicago)

“From Paper to Pottery: Imperial Yang for the Production of Dayazhai Ceramic Wares in Nineteenth-Century China”

Wednesday, May 18th, 2022

4:45 – 6:45 pm CT. Hybrid event (In-person at CWAC 152 + livestream via Zoom)


※ Please use this link to register for the zoom meeting. password: dyz518

※For this particular event, we will be having dinner after the talk. For those who would like to join this gathering after the event, please complete this form by Sunday (May, 15th) 11:59 p.m. so that we can place enough food for everyone. For your information, we are planning to order Italian cuisine.


Dayazhai Yang no. 4, 1873-74. Ink and color on paper, 45.4 x 70cm. The Palace Museum, Beijing.

Abstract

At the imperial court of Qing China (1644-1911), how exactly was it ensured that the things seen and used by the emperor were made according to the imperial order and taste? Based on the myriad of records of Neiwufu 內務府 (Imperial Household Department), a general summary of the mechanism can be made: After the emperor had given out an order to have a thing—ranging from a small bowl to attires and to an entire architecture complex—made, a yang 樣 that visually delineates the thing would first be presented to the emperor by court officials or artisans working at the Imperial Household Department. The emperor would make comments and changes based on the yang and give his approval, according to which the final thing could then be produced. This process could go back and forth multiple times, during which it was the yang that was amended until it was able to meet the emperor’s expectation. But what is this thing called “yang?” By definition, the character itself may be translated as “shape/appearance,” “sample,” “pattern,” or “model.” However, the answer to this question is actually not so much straightforward and is the focus of this presentation.

In particular, this presentation looks closely at one set of such yang created in 1873-74, the last years of Emperor Tongzhi 同治’s reign (r. 1862-1874), for the production of a group of ceramic wares for Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧 (1835-1908), now commonly referred to as Dayazhai 大雅齋 (Studio of Utmost Refinement) wares. Departing from previous scholarship on the Dayazhai ensemble, which pay more attention to the wares themselves rather than the yang and focus on the pictorial themes and stylistic features of these wares, this presentation instead aims to highlight the active role yang played in the overall commission and production process. By probing into the Dayazhai yang’s visual schemes, its maker and audiences, and the translation from yang to ceramics, I aim to demonstrate that rather than being merely a secondary object made for the creation of something final, the Dayazhai ceramic yang occupied a hierarchical position higher than the actual wares in both practical and conceptual terms because of its centrality in the shaping and delivery of Cixi’s ideals for imperial ceramics.

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Yan Jin is a PhD student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, studying visual and material culture of late imperial China. Her research interests include cross-regional exchanges, negotiation between global and local artistic traditions, and issues of materiality and intermediality. Yan received her BA in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2018) and her MA from the University of Chicago (2019) with a thesis on the production and display of glass mirror table screens at Emperor Qianlong’s court.

Xu Jin, May 6

Speaker: Xu Jin ( Assistant Professor of Art History and Asian Studies, Vassar College)

“Comparing Acts, Matching Images: Filial Sons and Reclusive Sages on the Funerary Couch of a Sogdian Immigrant in 6th-Century China”

May 6th, 2022 (Friday)

4:30 – 6:30 pm CT. Hybrid (In-person at CWAC 152 + livestream via Zoom)


※ Please use this link to register for the zoom meeting if you would like to attend remotely. password: sogdian56


(Liu Ling, One of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, Di Yu Couch. Eastern Wei Dynasty. Stone couch from Anyang, Henan Province. Shenzhen Museum)

Abstract:

Filial sons and reclusive sages (Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove and Rong Qiqi) were among the most esteemed figural subjects in Chinese art. They also appear on the stone funerary couch of Di Yu 翟育 (?-538), a Sogdian diplomat who immigrated to North China in the early sixth century. The Di Yu couch is the earliest known of over ten sarcophagi made for Sogdian leaders active in sixth-century China. This talk demonstrates how the quintessential Chinese subjects were selectively adopted and meticulously modified to address the Sogdian family’s life experiences. Moreover, I argue that Sogdian immigrants employed the images of reclusive sages to reconcile their Central Asian origin with the art and culture of native Chinese elites.

 

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Xu Jin is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Asian studies at Vassar College. He received his PhD in art history at the University of Chicago. His research has been focusing on religious and cultural exchanges on the Silk Road as reflected in Chinese art during the 6th and 7th centuries. His publications appear in the Burlington Magazine, the Journal of Asian Studies, and Journal of National Museum of China. Currently he is writing a book manuscript titled “Beyond Boundaries: Sogdian Sarcophagi and the Art of An Immigrant Community in 6th Century China”.