Presentations
Alice Casalini, “The Malleable Space of Gandhāran Art”
We cordially invite you to join us next Wednesday, May 10, from 4:45-6:45 pm CT for a VMPEA & RAVE joint workshop, featuring:
Alice Casalini
PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago
Who will be presenting the paper
“The Malleable Space of Gandhāran Art”
Discussant: Andrew Ollett
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, UChicago
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
4:45–6:45 pm CT, CWAC 152
*You can also use this link to join the talk on Zoom. No registration is required. The password is “malleable”.
A light reception will follow at the department lounge.
“Three architectural elements from Gandhāra,” digital collage, 2023.
Abstract
The monasteries of Gandhāra were teeming with an incredible array of images that adorned virtually every available surface. From carved panels that covered the walls, to icons and stelae that were installed in chapels and encroached the space of corridors and passageways, every monument was adorned with stone and stucco reliefs, while statues were meticulously gilded and painted. These objects, along with the perishable materials that did not survive in the archaeological record, came together to create an aesthetic of visual abundance.
The talk seeks to explore the role of this aesthetic in the context of the early Buddhist schools of Gandhāra. While textual sources are often used to shed light on these debates, the visual program in the monasteries played a significant role in shaping the Buddhist path to liberation in its own right and in a parallel fashion to the textual sources.
Alice Casalini received her BA and MA in Languages and Civilizations of Asia and Mediterranean Africa from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and studied Buddhist archaeology at the School of Archaeology and Museology of Peking University. She has conducted archaeological work in Italy, China, and Pakistan. Her research focuses on early Buddhist art and architecture of Northern India, Central Asia and Western China. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Paradigms of Beholding: the architecture of religious experience in Gandhāra,” explores the ways in which sacred spaces and religious objects create avenues for spiritual transformation. Alice is also a visual artist and illustrator.
Andrew Ollett is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. He studies the literary and intellectual traditions of South Asia, including works composed in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, and Kannada, mostly falling within the first millennium of the common era. His research has focused on the “question of language”: the availability and choice of certain languages for certain purposes, and the role of language in cultural production and change. He is the author of Language of the Snakes: Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India (2017). His current projects include an edition and translation of the Prakrit romance Lilavai a book on the beginnings of manuscript literacy in South Asia, a book on context-dependency in South Asian philosophies of language and, with Sarah Pierce Taylor, an edition and translation of The Way of the Poet-King, a ninth-century manual of poetics in Kannada.
Eugene Wang, “What is psychocosmic painting and how it came into being?”
We are pleased to invite you to a special VMPEA lecture next Monday, May 8, at 4:45 pm CT presented by Professor Eugene Wang from Harvard University. In his talk, Professor Wang will delve into the fascinating concept of psychocosmic painting and its origins in the work of the Taiwan-based Chinese artist Liu Guosong. This event is followed by a reception at the CWAC lounge.
Eugene Wang
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art, Harvard University
Presenting:
“What is psychocosmic painting and how it came into being?”
4:45-6:45 pm CT, May 8, 2023
Cochrane Woods Art Center, 152
Please use this link if you plan to join this event virtually. No registration is required. Password: “eclipse”
*Reception to follow in Cochrane Woods Art Center lounge
Liu Guosong. Eclipse, 1971. Detail. Private Collection, Hong Kong. Photo by Eugene Wang.
Abstract
History of art often comes down to the perennial struggle to conceive terms to capture new art forms and experiences. In the 1960s, the Taiwan-based Chinese artist Liu Guosong (1932-) produced a type of sublime paintings never seen in the history of Chinese art. No readymade term applies. He called it “abstract painting.” The term stuck. Over time, it also shows its strains, as it hardly captures the scope of his evolving long career, nor his prodigious output, ranging from astral bodies to planetary earth. Six decades later, we still search for a proper descriptive language to come to terms with his paintings. In hindsight, “psychocosmic painting” may be closer to capturing the dynamics of his oeuvre, alternatively called “metaphysical painting.” Its central impulse is to integrate mind and cosmos through the medium of painting. How so? Why him? Professor Wang’s lecture will unpack these questions.
Eugene Y. Wang is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University. He holds positions in History of Art and Architecture, Archaeology, Study of Religion, Theater, Dance, and Medium, and Inner Asia and Altaic Studies. A Guggenheim Fellow (2005), he is the art history editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004). His extensive publications range from early Chinese art and archeology to modern and contemporary Chinese art and cinema. His book, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005), explores Buddhist worldmaking; it received the Sakamoto Nichijin Academic Award from Japan. His current research focuses on cognitive study of art and mind. He is also the founding director of Harvard CAMLab that explores expanded scenography through digital media.
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.
Protected: Wu Hung’s Pre-circulated Paper
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
Anthony Stott, Nov 18
Please join us tomorrow for the fourth VMPEA workshop of this quarter, featuring:
Anthony Stott
PhD Candidate, East Asian Languages & Civilizations and Comparative Literature, UChicago
“Context After the End of Monumental Public Space: Toward an Archipelagic Reimagining of Urban Resistance in the Theory and Design of Isozaki Arata”
Discussant: Zhiyan Yang
PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago
Friday, November 18, 2022
6:00–8:00 pm CT, Zoom
Zoom Link: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/99126706613?pwd=WUhpT1JxQjR2bHB3Zjd5VFIzNlVWZz09
Please note the unusual date and time. This is a remote event.
**There are pre-circulated paper and slides for this workshop. You can find them in the other post with password “context”.
★Co-Sponsored by Art & Politics of East Asia workshop★
Jacques Derrida questioning Isozaki Arata and Asada Akira after Isozaki and Asada’s joint-presentation at the Anyone conference on May 11, 1991.
Abstract
The expulsion of protestors from Shinjuku Station West Exit Plaza in 1969 conventionally marks the end of monumental public space as a site for urban protests in Japan. Departing from this moment, this chapter explores the wanderings of the architect and theorist Isozaki Arata (1931–) in search of new sites for urban resistance. Isozaki builds on his earlier work on the environment and the cybernetic city to theorize this urban resistance as an alternative context that constructively short circuits the urban network, and he terms this “extra-context.” Putting into dialogue scholarship from across media studies, architectural theory, and urban history, I contend that Isozaki adopts extra-context not only to disrupt the unrestrained and homogenizing flows of information networks under globalization but also to oppose a transparency between built space and the environment as epitomized in imperialist architectural projects of the interwar period. Drawing on Isozaki’s writings in “Japanese-ness” in Architecture (Kenchiku ni okeru “nihonteki na mono,” 2003; first partially serialized in Critical Space between 1998 and 2000) and especially his extensive collaborations with the critic Asada Akira (1957–), I furthermore show how tracing Isozaki’s design via extra-context discloses a shift in his approach—from the eclectic citation of global forms in projects of the 1980s like Tsukuba Center, to the archipelagically derived performance halls of the 1990s. I thus aim to expand the critical possibilities of Isozaki’s work by attending to how the tethering of extra-context to the archipelagic resonates with and defies ecocriticism and other related discourses that explore the relation between ocean and media.
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Anthony Stott is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages & Civilizations and Comparative Literature who specializes in contemporary Japanese literature, media, and thought. His dissertation considers formations of artists and intellectuals around the preeminent Japanese-language journal of theory and criticism Critical Space (Hihyō kūkan, 1991–2002) through the lens of critique and its limits.
Zhiyan Yang is a doctoral candidate specializing in the history of modern and contemporary East Asian Architecture. He is currently completing a dissertation on post-socialist architecture through the lenses of architectural media and cultural production, including exhibitions, journals, history surveys and its intersection with contemporary visual culture and art. He received his BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2013 and MA from the University of Chicago in 2015. Zhiyan served as a researcher and overseas liaison of the Contemporary Chinese Art Yearbook Project spearheaded by Peking University and the University of Chicago since 2015. He has also previously interned at Xu Bing Studio in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.
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”.
Yan Yang, April 20
The recording of this event could be found HERE
Speaker: Yan Yang
(Assistant Professor of Art History, Music and Art, Borough of Manhattan Community College CUNY)
“Tracing the Formation of a National Style: Yamato-e from World Fairs to Wartimes”
Discussant: Minori Egashira (PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago)
April 20th, 2022 (Wednesday), 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 “yamatoe”
Tale of Genji Picture Scroll, Sekiya Chapter. 12th century. Tokugawa Art Museum
Abstract: How does a national style come into existence? Does it form through a consensus by a panel of experts or in some other way? Although yamato-e has been characterized as a national style of Japanese art since the 1930s by Japanese art historians, what led to this codification? This presentation examines primary sources produced before the 1930s, from government-sponsored exhibitions intended to teach a foreign audience about Japanese culture at World Fairs, to Japanese texts about surviving works of art that are celebrated as extant examples of yamato-e such as the Tale of Genji Picture Scrolls, in order to trace the formation of yamato-e as the pictorial embodiment of the Japanese national style.
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Yan Yang received her B.A and Ph.D degrees from Yale University. After teaching at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and at Kyushu University in Japan, she is currently at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her primary field of interest in Japanese art historiography and epistemology. She has published on the 20th-century codification of the concept of Japanese art known as yamato-e. This presentation is an extension of a larger project that explores the formation of yamato-e before the 20th century.
Minori Egashira is a PhD candidate studying under Dr. Chelsea Foxwell at The University of Chicago. Her research focuses on Meiji-period (1868–1912) sculpture, and Japan’s artistic interactions with the world in modern and contemporary times. Her broader interests include East Asian sculptural art and other three-dimensional objects, World Fairs, and investigating non-orthodox narratives of Japanese art history.