Mengge Cao, The Expanded Surface of Painting in Middle Period China

We cordially invite you to join us this Friday, Feb 21, at 4:45-6:45pm CTCWAC 152 for the fourth VMPEA workshop this winter. The workshop features:

 

Mengge Cao

Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Art History, University of Chicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

The Expanded Surface of Painting in Middle Period China” 

 

Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

 

 

Detail from Reading in an Open Hall (Fengyan zhanjuan 風檐展卷). Leaf. Ink and color on silk. 24.8 x 25.2 cm. National Palace Museum.

 

Abstract:

The development of painting formats in Middle Period (750-1300) China was often portraited as a linear progression, emphasizing the decline of mural tradition and the growing prevalence of scroll mountings. This reductive narrative oversimplifies the dynamic interactions among diverse painting formats and limits our understanding of historical viewers’ experiences. This research proposes a “surface-oriented” framework that broadens the scope for exploring the ontologies and functions of paintings during this period. In his influential book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), James J. Gibson argued that surfaces provide the essential affordances for perception and action, serving as the primary interface between an organism and its surroundings. Surfaces serve as the interface through which humans and animals navigate the world, traversing the boundaries of objects, the self, and others. They provide the contexts and relationships that connect things, bodies, and environments. This framework repositions surfaces as a critical lens to examine the roles of paintings on furniture and utilitarian objects, as well as the emergence of independent mounting formats such as hanging scrolls, handscrolls, and leaves. By focusing on surfaces, paintings are no longer seen as static entities in fixed categories but as dynamic, conceptual, and material processes that actively shaped the experiences of historical viewers. In this workshop, I will present a work-in-progress exploration of this “surface-oriented” framework and analyze selected art objects to illustrate its potential for rethinking the development of painting formats in Middle Period China.

 

Bio:

Mengge Cao is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for the Art of East Asia (CAEA) in conjunction with the Department of Art History. His research examines the development of painting formats in Middle Period China (750–1350), with a special focus on the relationship between painting’s objecthood, perceiving bodies, and the built environment. He is also interested in exploring the agency of reprographic technologies in East Asian art history. At CAEA, Mengge is responsible for providing research content, developing the curatorial narrative, and writing labels for the exhibition related to the Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project (DCADP). Mengge received his PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. In his dissertation “Small-Size Painting and its Viewership in Southern Song Dynasty China, 1127–1279,” Mengge conducts quantitative analyses of nearly 1,500 entries from the “Song Dynasty Painting Database” and argues that small-size paintings gained medium specificities at the turn of the late twelfth century and facilitated interpersonal communication among emperors, imperial families, and courtiers in the Inner Court.

Xuemiao Wang, Fans in the Tombs

We cordially invite you to join us on Friday, Feb 14, at 4:45-6:45pm CTCWAC 152 for the third VMPEA workshop this winter. The workshop features:

 

Xuemiao Wang

Visiting PhD Student, Art History, UChicago | PhD Candidate, Zhejiang University

 

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

Fans in the Tombs: Echoes of Elegance and Ritual from Ming Dynasty Folding Fans” 

 

This workshop will take place in-person only, and the Q&A session will be conducted in both Chinese and English. Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

 

Geometric-patterned gold-sprinkled bamboo folding fan with gold paper, unearthed from the tomb of Zhu Shoucheng

 

Abstract:

The phenomenon of folding fans unearthed from Ming Dynasty tombs is particularly notable in 27 burial sites and 89 folding fans concentrated in the Jiangnan region. These burial items were especially prevalent during the mid-to-late Ming period, reflecting the cultural trends and funerary practices of the time. Findings indicate that painted fans and plain white paper fans were widely used as burial items in Jiangnan tombs, a practice that first appeared among commoners before gold-decorated fans were incorporated into the aristocratic “burial clothing (lianyi 殓衣)” system. The evolution of folding fans from luxury goods to significant burial objects showcases the Ming fascination with material culture. Gender and social disparities in the distribution of burial fans are evident, with female tombs often containing more exquisite examples. Understanding the phenomenon of Ming Dynasty burial fans requires attention not only to the literati’s aesthetic preferences and the “burial clothing” customs but also to the material characteristics of Ming tombs. Folding fans were not only included as functional items but were accompanied by a variety of other personal possessions and cultural commodities, the number and diversity of which far exceeded those of earlier periods. The Ming obsession with material possessions is vividly reflected in the transformation of burial objects. Jiangnan tombs had unique historical conditions that favored the inclusion of burial items. When viewed in this context, the burial of gold fans in Ming tombs ceases to appear as an isolated or exceptional phenomenon. Instead, it becomes an integral part of the distinctive commercial and funerary culture of the Ming Dynasty.

 

Bio:

Xuemiao Wang 王雪苗 is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Zhejiang University and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago for the current academic year. Her research focuses on Chinese funerary paintings from the 6th to 13th centuries, with a particular emphasis on tomb screen imagery. Her dissertation examines the primary characteristics and formal transformations of tomb screens during this period, using these changes to explore broader shifts in funerary culture between the Tang and Song Dynasties. In addition to her work on tomb screens, she is also interested in other forms of funerary art, including hanging scrolls found in burial contexts. Her current article on folding fans unearthed from Ming Dynasty tombs investigates the sudden incorporation of cultural commodities into funerary traditions, reflecting broader intersections of material culture and burial practices.

Yifan Zou, In the Folds of Dynastic Models

We cordially invite you to join us on Friday, Jan 31, at 4:45-6:45pm CTCWAC 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.

Yuanxie Shi, Beyond Rural and Urban Material Cultures

We cordially invite you to join us this FridayJan 10, at 4:45-6:45pm CTCWAC 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.

Wang You, Dike Dynamics

We cordially invite you to join us this FridayDec 13, at 4:45-6:45pm CTCWAC 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.

Meng-Hsuan Lee, Japanese Aryanism for the Tropics

We cordially invite you to join us tomorrowDec 3, at 4:45-6:45pm CTCWAC 152 for our fourth VMPEA workshop this fall. Please note the unusual time. This workshop features:

Meng-Hsuan Lee

PhD Candidate, Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University

Lecturer in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

Japanese Aryanism for the Tropics: Ide Kaoru’s Round-Arch Style in Colonial Taiwan” 

 

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

Please see the abstract and bio for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

Ide Kaoru, Kenkō Shrine, Taipei, 1928

Abstract:

Since the German architect and theorist Heinrich Hübsch posed the discourse-altering question “In Which Style Should We Build?” (1828), the Rround-Arch Style (Rundbogenstyl), or commonly generalized as the Romanesque Revival, has migrated beyond central Europe and become a global phenomenon. In recent years, scholars have posited the popularity of Romanesque Revival in North America as a function of the myth of the migratory Anglo-Saxons or Aryans. Interestingly, if this style is indeed associated with Aryanism, it has found equal enthusiasm in the Japanese Empire, particularly in the 1910s-1930s.

By focusing on the architect and theorist Ide Kaoru 井手薰 (1879-1944), a champion for the Round-Arch Style, this paper speculates that Ide, along with peers and followers, sought to use the style and associated techniques to evolve the Japanese race into a migratory one that can settle across various climate zones. As the Chief Architect of the Government-General in colonial Taiwan, Ide treated the Round-Arch Style not as an ossified historical style but as a flexible and evolvable technique. For him, it is not only suitable for reinforced concrete construction, but can also be easily hybridized with local styles and help achieve an evolved Japanese race. I argue that under this ideology of evolutionism or even a form of Aryanism, professed by some Japanese race scientists, Ide’s oeuvre in colonial Taiwan ranged from pan-Eurasian hybridity, such as the 1928 Kenkō Shrine 建功神社, to works with more modernist sensibilities.

Bio:

Meng-Hsuan Lee is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University. He studies 19th and 20th-century architecture and urbanism. His dissertation, Shop-House, Verandah-Arcade, Decorated Façade: An Excavation of Commercial Architecture in Japanese Colonial Taiwan, examines a dialectical history of planning and vernacular architecture, and the emergence of capitalism in Taiwan since c. 1860. Broadly, he considers planning and regulation techniques, the “contact zones” of colonialism, histories and theories of ornament, and media archaeology.

Yuzhe Cao, The Transcendent Landscape

We cordially invite you to join us next FridayNov 8, at 4:45-6:45pm CTCWAC 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.

PETER DENG, THE BORDERLESS CIRCLE: YOSHIHARA JIRŌ’S ENSO

We cordially invite you to join us on Friday, October 25, at 4:45-6:45pm CTCWAC 152 for our first VMPEA workshop this fall. This workshop features:

 

Peter Yuheng Deng

MAPH 2nd Year, UChicago

 

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

The Borderless Circle: Yoshihara Jirō’s Enso” 

 

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

Please see the abstract and bio for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

 

Image: Jiro Yoshihara (1950-1972), White Circle on Black. 1965. Acrylics on canvas. 182.0 × 227.5cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

 

Abstract:

This paper examines a lesser-explored aspect of Yoshihara Jirō’s work, focusing on his Enso paintings, and situates these works within the context of the internationalization of “dentō” or tradition in the Japanese postwar avant-garde movement. The Enso paintings, created in oil and acrylic, represent Yoshihara’s response to combat the systematic marginalization of non-Western art in a predominantly Euro-American art world. By leveraging the Zen symbol of Enso, Yoshihara aimed to establish a more equitable form of artistic exchange that transcends cultural boundaries, promoting a “borderless” dialogue.

The Enso, a symbol of enlightenment in Zen Buddhism, signifies the non-dualistic nature of reality, challenging distinctions between representation and abstraction, as well as between writing and picturing. Yoshihara’s choice of this symbol was not a superficial nod to Japanese tradition but a deeply considered effort to integrate Japan’s cultural heritage into the global abstract expressionist movement. His work sought to counteract the perception of Japanese art as marginal and derivative, highlighting its intrinsic value within the global art narrative.

This paper explores how Yoshihara’s abstract renderings of Enso, through their imperfect and eccentric forms, embody the principles of Zen and engage with the aesthetics of abstract expressionism. It examines the significance of the Enso in Zen practice, where it serves as both an artistic and spiritual exercise, and how Yoshihara recontextualized this tradition within his modernist framework.

Yoshihara’s Enso paintings are analyzed in the context of their historical reception, particularly the challenges faced during the First Japanese Art Festival in Chicago in 1966 and the earlier skepticism from Western critics. By drawing parallels between traditional Zen calligraphy and modern abstract art, the paper argues that Yoshihara’s work represents a crucial intersection between Eastern and Western art forms, contributing to a more inclusive and multifaceted understanding of postwar global art as transnational history.

Yoshihara Jirō’s Enso paintings reflect a synthesis of East Asian and Western artistic traditions, advancing a vision of art that transcends cultural and geographical boundaries. His work exemplifies a deliberate effort to reframe Japanese art within a global context, overcoming representation and eliding the differences between writing and picturing, ethnicity and universality.

 

Bio:

Peter Yuheng Deng is a master’s student in Art History at the University of Chicago, specializing in Japanese 19th-20th century Japanese art. He holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from Haverford College. His current research explores the role of tradition in early post-war Japanese contemporary art and how material culture challenges the dichotomies between East and West, local and universal.

Beyond his academic pursuits, Yuheng is also a passionate performance artist and painter. His creative practice seeks to blend diverse artistic forms, particularly through theater and performance painting. By merging his artistic practice with his theoretical research, Yuheng aims to address canonical issues in contemporary East Asian art and foster new dialogues between traditional and modern expressions.

[Co-Sponsored with OPC] Reiko Tomii, “Thinking Operationally”

Please join us next WednesdayMay 15, at 4:45-6:45pm CTCWAC 152 for our next and very last VMPEA workshop of the academic year, co-sponsored with DoVA’s Open Practice Committee. This workshop features:

 

Reiko Tomii

Independent Art Historian and Curator

 

Who will be presenting the talk titled:

Thinking Operationally” 

 

Discussant: Tongji Philip Qian

Artist and Collegiate Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, 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 before the year ends!

 

Image Credit: Courtesy of Misa Shin Gallery, Tokyo.

 

Abstract/Statement

The twin-book project that I launched in late 2022, “Thinking Operationally,” centers on the concept of “operation” as an integral part of art history. My starting point is a new definition of an artist labor, which in my definition consists of two parts, “expression” and “operation.” While the first type of labor, “expressions,” typically takes place inside the artist’s studio, the second type of labor, “operations,” concerns making their work public and, when necessary, building systems to support themselves and engage society outside the studio. By extension, I define “operation,” either by the artist and others, as a set of activities that generate channels or circuits through which the artist’s expression is communicated to society at large.

This view emerged from my close study of collectivism in modern Japan, which dates back to the last 19th century and continued into the 21st century. In fact, Japan serves as a counter reference point to the Euro-American idea of artistic autonomy, because artists’ group activities have been essential for advancing new art and for building new art systems in modern Japan.

Based on this conceptualization, I have envisioned the two-book project. The first is a one-year plan to write a small book, titled “Thinking Operationally,” in Japanese to outline the theoretical import of “operations” in modern Japan and examine seven topics including Gutai, artist-organized independent exhibitions, and Tokyo Biennale 1970. For this part, I have a publisher confirmed (East Press in Tokyo) and I am in the process of completing the first draft. The second is a five-year plan to follow the first, for which I am planning an English-language survey of 1960s art in Japan which will reconsider the role and place of “operation” by focusing on the exhibition history. Provisionally titled “Exhibition as Expression, Exhibition as Operation,” the book will explore the exhibitions as the vital site of communication and socialization of expression for artists as much as curators and museums. In doing so, the book will illuminate the crucial postwar decade when Japan’s contemporary art rapidly expanded in a dual drive of both a top-down push of institutionalization in the mainstream and a bottom-up urgency of the wilderness.

 

Bios

Reiko Tomii is an independent scholar and curator specializing in postwar Japanese art history. In 1988–92, she worked at the Center for International Contemporary Art (CICA), where her first project involved organizing a personal archive of Kusama Yayoi for CICA’s inaugural exhibition. Kusama’s first retrospective in the U.S. in 1989, for which Tomii collaborated with Alexandra Munroe, brought the Japanese artist back to New York and in retrospect launched Kusama’s ascendance to global super stardom. Since 1992, upon the closure of CICA, Tomii has worked as independent scholar. She collaborated with Munroe on the latter’s book published in conjunction with the exhibition Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky.

Curatorially, she worked with Queens Museum of Art in New York for Global Conceptualism, Tate Modern in London for Century City, and Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles for Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art, among many others. While widely published in the area of modern and contemporary Asian art, she has enjoyed working with younger and emerging scholars, and co-founded PoNJA-GenKon with Miwako Tezuka in 2003.

Tomii’s first monograph Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, 2016) received the 2017 Robert Motherwell Book Award and was turned into an exhibition Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s at Japan Society Gallery in New York in 2019. In 2020, she received the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award from the Japanese government for cultural transmission and international exchange through postwar Japanese art history.

She is currently preparing for the publication of her second monograph, Thinking Operationally: Toward a Global Narration of Japanese-Type Modernism. Published by East Press in Tokyo, the book is her first monograph in Japanese and will serve as the foundation of her third monograph, to be published in English, provisionally titled, Exhibition as Expression, Exhibition as Operation: Japanese Art in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

Tongji Philip Qian is a multidisciplinary artist and the co-founder of TPQ Studio. As artist, he is interested in capturing the edge of an artistic practice through his idiosyncratic definitions of #speed, #labor, #internationalism, and #immigration. His art writing, on the other hand, studies movements commonly associated with Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Conceptual art. Tongji Philip Qian’s recent projects include “No-risk Hour” (2019–), “Neighborly Passport Keep Right Except to Pass” (2023), “Questionnairing Reality” (2021), and “Art Beside a Single Handshake” (2020). His work is housed in a number of public collections, such as the Asia Art Archive in America, Center for Book Arts, and the RISD Museum. Qian received his BAs in art history and mathematics from Carleton College and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Tongji Philip Qian is currently a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. 

In spring 2024, Qian launched the State VIII Project (2024-2027), an artist-run project space in Hyde Park, Chicago, USA, and the State VIII Project Artist and Writer Residency Program, a free-of-charge experience offering creative professionals uninterrupted time and space to consider their work.