China

Speaker: Boyao Ma (Visiting Graduate Student, Department of Art History, University of Chicago; Ph.D Candidate, Department of Archaeology, Sichuan University)

“Expanding Space in Passageway: the Architectural Space and Image of a 5th-century Tomb in Xi’an”

Discussant: Li Jiang (Ph.D Student, Department of Art History, University of Chicago)

Please use this link to register for the zoom meeting. 

(Aerial view of the painted carved-earth gatehouses at the Zhongzhao tomb, Xi’an.)

Speaker: Valentina Boretti (Research Associate, SOAS University of London)

“New Wine in Old Bottles?: The Re-tagging of Playthings in Twentieth-century China”

Discussant: Xi Zhang (PhD Candidate, University of Chicago)

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022

4:45 – 6:45 pm CST, Remotely via Zoom 

Please use this link to register for the zoom meeting. The password to this zoom session is “toys0302.”

Qimeng huabao 啟蒙畫報 1.2 (1903)

Abstract:

In twentieth-century China, toys became signs and agents of child and adult improvement, or lack thereof. Pacing-horse lamps like the one shown above, for instance, could equally serve to introduce children to science and patriotism; or to demonstrate Chinese inanity in having used scientific principles to produce a mere toy; or instead to reveal Chinese resourcefulness and precocious command of science. The significance of toys was, in turn, a consequence of the premium importance assigned to youths.

Advocating the cultivation of vigorous subjects, as opposed to the lethargic inadequacy that allegedly marked Chinese personhood, reformers and cultural brokers disseminated from the late nineteenth century a discourse of childrearing and education that reframed playthings as key formative tools. For ‘new’ children, they posited, would be shaped only by means of educational methods that seconded their peculiarities, which ‘tradition’ supposedly had ignored. Having construed the young as ‘instinctively’ play-loving and mobile, this discourse then identified toys as tools for providing imperceptible (hence more effectual) moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and physical instruction to children as they played. Yet, to achieve this goal, toys ought to be ‘appropriate’, namely educational, scientific, attractive, safe, ideally movable and novel.

Drawing on textual, visual and material sources dating from the 1900s to the 1960s, my talk will explore these discursive labels across political regimes: for – with moderate variations – the discourse of toys seamlessly transitioned from the Republican to the Maoist era, and most of the playthings that had raised citizens were found apt to raise successors. The talk will, moreover, note that whilst branding toys as indicative of advancement or backwardness, scientific, or conducive to political engagement was quite new, the objects these tags were appended to were often age-old. Old-ish bottles, in sum, were made to contain new-ish wine.

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Valentina Boretti is Research Associate in the Department of History, SOAS University of London. She works on the cultural history of modern China, and has published on gender, material culture and childhood. Her research, funded among others by the British Academy, takes toys as a lens to explore child and adult citizen-building, mobilisation, and continuities or changes across regimes in twentieth-century China.

Xi Zhang has defended her dissertation entitled The City’s Pleasures: Urban and Visual Culture of Garden Spaces in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s and will receive her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in March 2022. She is currently teaching at the School of Art Institute of Chicago as a lecturer. Her research and teaching focus on the history of modern Chinese art and architecture, with a particular interest in the interplay of spatial practices and visual culture within transcultural contexts from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.

Meng Zhao (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History)

“Theatrical Beholding: Visualizing Gaze in the Southern Song Court Milieu (1127-1279)” 

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2022 [Postponed]

4:45 – 6:45 pm CT,  Remotely via Zoom

Please use this link to register for the zoom meeting. The password to this zoom session is “103291“

Ma Yuan 馬遠 (1160-1225), detail of “Spring Gazing from the High Terrace,” in Landscape Album Paired with Imperial Poetic Inscriptions 宋帝命题册, ca. 1194-1224. Set of ten pairs of album leaves; ink, color and gold on silk, 26.6×27.3 cm; anonymous collection, New York.

Abstract:

By the middle of the twelfth century, a narrowly focused vision characterized the Southern Song (1127-1279) landscape art. Instead of the timeless aspect of nature conveyed in earlier landscape paintings, an introspective sensibility is marked by the presence of a quietly contemplating figure within the intimate format of square album leaves and circular fan paintings. The aim of this chapter is to propose the art-historical conventions, aesthetic conditions, and socio-historical forces in relation to the Southern Song court milieu that allowed and shaped this dominant mode of visualizing gaze in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A specific group of paintings featuring a prominent gazing figure suggests a mode of what I call an “imperial gaze” and is foregrounded as a pivot around which an inclusive, plural understanding of these scenes is constructed. The key question is to what extent the Southern Song court art could have been shaped by a notion of “spectacle” that was founded not only on the representation of a beholding subject, but also on the necessity of envisioning the painting plane as a theatrical stage. The construction of this sort of theatrical spaces, in both a physical and mental sense, and the experience of situating oneself as beholder, were widely observed in various forms of imperial entertainments of the period.

Meng Zhao is a PhD candidate studying Chinese art with focuses on painting practices of the middle period (ca. 800-1400). Her doctoral dissertation, Roaming, Gazing, and Listening: Human Presence and Sensory Impression in Song Landscape Art (960-1279), investigates the related ways in which major landscapists from the end of the eleventh to the thirteenth century turned their attention to the portrayal of human presence and responded in various efforts to the psychosomatic dimension of multi-layered figure-landscape relationships. She is also interested in pictorializations of the medieval conception of female beauty and its relation to the mingling of senses, and the representation of dreams and visions in late imperial China. This year, her research is funded with a Chinese Studies Dissertation Fellowship from the Center for East Asian Studies at UChicago.

Speaker: Lucien Sun (Ph.D. Student, Department of Art History)

“Flipping Over and Stretching Out: Reading an Accordion-Fold Painting“

Discussant: Shiqiu Liu (Ph.D. Candidate, University of Melbourne)

Wednesday, October 27th, 2021

5:45 – 7:45 pm CT, Remotely via Zoom

*Please use this link to register for the zoom meeting.

Abstract:

A new binding format—a long sheet of paper folded back and forth to formulate the shape of an accordion—emerged in China during the Tang–Song transition. Historians of book usually refer to it as jingzhe zhuang 經折裝. Few have considered, however, the specificity of this accordion-fold binding style as art medium, despite that many sutras contain a multi-page frontispiece illustration. This special format allows the viewer to flip over pages of picture like reading an illustrated bound book and meanwhile stretch out several consecutive pages, fold them, and proceed as if rolling a handscroll. In this paper, I will study a twelfth-century Buddhist painting attributed to the artist Zhang Shengwen 張勝溫 of the Dali Kingdom. My analysis of this painting concentrates on the complicated relations between the accordion-fold medium and the images it bears, a path that hardly anyone has taken before. The first six pages of the painting that depict the procession of the Dali emperor Zhixing and his entourage provide us with a starting point to formulate some structural principles that the artist followed when working on an accordion fold. Several symmetrical scenes of different scale in this painting further demonstrate how the artist reconciled the conflict between the desired iconic composition and the material circumstances of this format. Through a close reading of this painting, I intend to come up with a preliminary set of features that characterize the incredible flexibility of this popular East Asian art medium in relation to the artist, the viewer and the images it bears.

Zhang Shengwen. Dali Emperor Duan Zhixing and his entourage worshipping the Buddha. Pages 1–6. 1173–1176 CE. Each page H. 30.4 cm x W. 12 cm. Color on paper. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

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Lucien Sun  is a PhD student in in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Fudan University, Shanghai. He also spent a year at the University of Tokyo studying Japanese collections of Chinese and East Asian art. He is currently interested in how picture in its broad sense moved across space, borders, and visual media in north China between the eleventh to the fourteenth century.

Shiqiu Liu is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and holds a MA from the University of St Andrews. Her current research is on art works produced under the cultural exchanges stimulated by the Mongol rule of Eurasia in the fourteenth century, focusing especially on works made by professional artisans for those ethnically non-Chinese in Yuan China. She is interested in pre-modern artistic exchanges through cultural communications between China and areas around East and Central Asia.