Presentations
[Co-sponsored with RAVE] Alan Longino, “Return to Character: Morita Shiryu and Work of the 1960s “
This Wednesday, October 25 at 4:45 PM, the RAVE and VMPEA workshops together will be hosting their first collaboration of the year in Room 152 of the Cochrane Woods Art Center (the Home of Art History).
The presenter will be Alan Longino (Ph.D. student, Art History) discussing the work of the calligrapher Morita Shiryu (b. 1912, d. 1998).
Presenting his working paper, Return to Character: Morita Shiryu and Work of the 1960s
The session’s respondent will be Cole Gruber (Ph.D. student, Art History).
For attendees on ZOOM, please register at the link below and use the password given. https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0rc-2oqz0oHtSbsPEbL0xMxL4b1ahKArQ4#/registration
Password: 000000
We look forward to seeing many a visage there, and look forward to hosting you for more RAVE & VMPEA collaborations throughout the year.
Abstract
The work and practice of Morita Shiryu—one of the founders of Bokujinkai, editor of the group’s long-running journal, Bokubi, and pioneering philosopher on avant-garde calligraphy—is difficult to pin-down. One of Shiryu’s primary goals was to elevate calligraphy to the level of abstract art being practiced in his time, such as Abstract Expressionism in New York of Art Informel in Paris. This paper looks at a critical point in the history of the artist’s work—the late 1950s to early 1960s—when his style and beliefs around calligraphy slowly turned away from the desire for abstraction and back to the formation of character-based writing. The field of research around his work at this time ties this shift to a growing dissatisfaction with artists in the West, and the limited understanding of Zen philosophies embedded in the work of calligraphy. However, while the stylistic shift in the work is apparent at this time, I argue that due to the philosophies and materials utilized and developed by Shiryu in the 1950s the work became even more progressively avant-garde, and that by developing new compound mixtures with which to paint, he was not only able to tackle even larger format works—such as multi-paneled screens—but that he was able to draw out the temporal qualities of language across these large-scale works. In this effort, he was able to imbue new dimensions into calligraphy, and by doing so achieved an abstraction of characters and language that was even more pronounced than in previous work.
Bio
Alan Longino is a Ph.D. student focusing on postwar Japanese conceptual art and global contemporary art. His research considers the artist Yutaka Matsuzawa (b. 1922 – d. 2006, Shimo Suwa) and the artist’s approach to a dematerialized practice that was hinged upon a system of quantum physics, non-Zen Buddhism, and para-psychology. In 1988, Matsuzawa published his Quantum Art Manifesto, which set out directions, instructions, kōans, and other meditations for the reader to consider their connection to art on a quantum level. This manifesto was the culmination of the artist’s decades-long practice that focused on making the “invisible, invisible” (Tomii, 2016), and is the central focus of his dissertation. In addition to his research on Matsuzawa, he has also produced shows on the artist’s work at Yale Union (Portland, OR, 2019), and Empty Gallery (Hong Kong, 2021) in collaboration with the independent art historian and curator, Reiko Tomii.
Taylor Chisato Stewart, “Shibata Zeshin & The Construction of Kogei”
The workshop for Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia is thrilled to jump into this calendar year, as we have a number of great presentations both from students & faculty within the university and from visiting speakers.
Starting this year off, Wednesday, October 11, is the Art History Department’s own, Taylor Chisato Stewart.
She will be presenting on Shibata Zeshin And The Construction of Kōgei.
The workshop will be held in Room 152 of the Cochrane Woods Art Center, from 4:45 to 6:45 PM CT.
Shibata Zeshin, Three Men Looking at Framed Lacquer Drawing (Edo, c. 1850)
Album leaf; lacquer on gold paper
4 3/4 x 3 1/2 in.
Abstract:
When he was born, Shibata Zeshin’s (1807–1891) native Tokyo was still called Edo. Trained in both painting and the laborious process of making lacquered objects, he came to invent several cutting-edge techniques in the lacquer medium, including a method of painting the viscous material—famously difficult to manipulate, even on three-dimensional surfaces—on paper while still maintaining its structural integrity. Despite the flurry of scholarship and museum activity that has surrounded Zeshin’s work for over a century, and that most of his extant works were created in the Meiji period (1868–1912), he is often relegated to a retrospective role in the vein of “the last true Edo-period craftsman.” A large amount of the Zeshin scholarship is concerned with his technical innovations in lacquer and his relationship with the Shijō school of painting. The referential and self-reflexive, perhaps modernist, streak that permeates his practice goes relatively understated.
I will examine a selection of Zeshin’s works, mainly lacquer objects, in relation to the conceptual (and linguistic) changes enacted by Japan’s imperial government concerning the category of “craft.” Uprooting previous notions of the status of and separation between mediums like painting, sculpture, and craft, the Meiji government created the word kōgei—a sort of portmanteau of the characters for “craftsmanship” and “art”—in its project to promote Japanese arts to an international audience. I argue that, far from being a lingering traditionalist, Zeshin often addressed such changes to his profession through clever visual and material play. I will also consider the word sōshoku, loosely meaning “decoration.” Sōshoku was an archaic compound that the new government adopted in response to foreign commerce. I believe that much of the self-reflexive quality of Zeshin’s work can be attributed to his interactions with these new, and volatile, concepts of craft and decorative art.
Bio
Taylor Chisato Stewart is a Ph.D. student studying art history at the University of Chicago. Her primary area of research is modern Japanese painting and decorative arts (early Meiji period). She is interested in issues of stylistic hybridity, Japanese exported self-identities and art extremities. She received her BA in English and art history at Vassar College, where she wrote her undergraduate thesis on the nihonga painter Kano Hōgai and eccentricity as a framework for artistic identity. Outside of her studies, her writing has appeared in Orientations. She also served as an assistant to contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija in his capacity as art director of Okayama Art Summit 2022.
Susan Huang, “The Fodingxin Dharani Scripture and its Audience”
We are delighted to announce that in addition to the Smart Lecture, Professor Shih-shan Susan Huang will be at the VMPEA workshop on May 12 (Friday) from 4:45–6:45pm CT at CWAC 152 to discuss an article derived from her latest book project. We also invite you to come and ask any remaining questions you may have after the Smart Lecture.
Shih-shan Susan Huang
Associate Professor of Transnational Asian Studies, Rice University
Who will be presenting and discussing the paper
“The Fodingxin Dharani Scripture and its Audience: Healing, Talisman Culture, and Women in Popular Buddhist Print Culture”
Friday, May 12, 2023
4:45–6:45 pm CT, CWAC 152
*A light reception will follow at the department lounge.
Fodingxin Dharani Scripture. 1102 CE. Northern Song. National Library, Beijing.
Abstract
This study examines the book art contained within the Fodingxin Dharani Scripture (Fodingxin tuoluoni jing 佛頂心陀羅尼經; hereafter also called the dharani text), with the broader concerns of how popular Buddhist print culture addresses healing, talisman culture, and women. The primary sources it investigates include a ninth-to-tenth century Dunhuang manuscript and other illustrated printed counterparts dated from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. The Fodingxin Dharani Scripture, an indigenous Chinese Buddhist text traceable to medieval Dunhuang manuscript culture, synthesizes miscellaneous beliefs, turning a Buddhist scripture into a form of magical medicine. The twelfth century marks fresh illustrative and talismanic traditions in the print age. The printed text is accompanied by a frontispiece at the beginning, and three talismanic scripts at the end. The book art of the Fodingxin Dharani Scripture reached its peak in the first half of the fifteenth century. In addition to the frontispiece and talismanic scripts, the text is fully illustrated throughout, with its new illustrated repertoire highlighting the healing power of the scripture and the dharani charms, as well as the challenges women faced in childbirth. Numerous extant specimens offer valuable documentations of its donors, most of whom were residents in Ming (1368–1644) Beijing. Accompanied by lively narrative pictures and containing Daoist-inspired talismanic writs that promise to save women from birth complications, it was often printed on demand. Women and their families, preoccupied with childbirth complications or ardently desiring a baby boy, were its main donors.
Shih-shan Susan Huang (PhD, History of Art, Yale) is an Associate Professor at Rice University’s newly-founded Department of Transnational Asian Studies. Her book, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard Asian Center, 2012), translated into Chinese by Dr. Zhu Yiwen, was published by Zhejiang University Press in 2022. She co-edited Visual and Material Cultures of the Middle Period China with Patricia Ebrey (Brill, 2017). Her recent articles explore Song-to-Ming book art of the Lotus Sutra and Diamond Sutra, Buddhist printing under Tangut Xi Xia rule, and painting and printing connections. Huang’s new monograph, The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Buddhist Book Roads in China and its Neighbors, forthcoming in the Brill series Crossroads – History of Interaction across the Silk Routes, examines printed images and texts as objects “on the move”, as they were transmitted along networks and book roads in a transnational context. For more information, visit https://shihshansusanhuang.com/
Protected: Susan Huang’s Pre-circulated Paper
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.