Presentations

Jan 14, Kao Chien-Hui

campus Leave a Comment
Kao Chien-Hui

Independent curator and art critic

Friday, January 14, 2- 4 pm
CWAC 156

The Transformation of Line and Form
–The Linking Context of the Chinese Figure/Narrative Painting and the Comic World

Abstract:

The special subject exhibition of the 7th International Ink Art Biennale of Shenzhen, ‘Com(ic)media on Line’, re-interprets the lines of comics and Chinese painting to form a broader aesthetic of lines across art media. This exhibition brings together Eastern and Western in order to investigate the similarities of this mass-oriented art form, examining the communication and transmission of simple brush and line drawings, while demonstrating the humor of these fascinating visualizations which metaphorically recreate the real world and the various vicissitudes of human life.

From historical and contemporary coordinates, the linearity of comics has converged with classical literature and the world of images, as well as the contemporary cartoons and animation development. In the 20th century, reading modern Chinese comics has become the populous’ version of art viewing, a sort of pictorial vernacular for popularizing classical literature and art, paralleled by illustrated novels, graphic novels, children’s picture books, prints, current affairs caricatures, etc. Many modern ink painters also gain inspiration by taking various ingredients from cartoons and graphic novels. In the context of contemporary culture, this influence has also entered into printing, newsletters, painting books, cartoons, and even the young subculture’s comics, animation and costume play, as well as digital technology’s linear display vocabulary and its new creative concepts.

“Com(ic)media on Line”takes its name from the concept of the line, the expression of lines, the interest in lines, and the re-presentation of the world that is enclosed by or the différance of the linear zone. In the perspective of religion, the human/space refers to a place in-between the physical and spiritual. Being a state of transition that exists beyond physical body, the zone becomes a temporary practice space for spirit and soul. Just like the Dante’s La Divina Commedia which describes the author’s travels through hell, purgatory, and heaven, this religious-like world mentally connects to human behavior and the process of art creation. The différance of lines has been the spindle of it, and the audience would be able to access to the virtual world projected by lines, shadows and figures by following the strolling of line, or being on-line, online or off-line. It would also concern the artistic and cultural domain of the aesthetics of line, and the studies of the interdisciplinary interchange of psychology, mythology and semiotics.

The exhibition includes works in the forms of ink on paper and silk, woodblock prints, illustrations, cartoons, animation, video, sculpture, graffiti, etc. In addition to the recent or new works by invited foreign and domestic artists, there is also a loan collection of more than a hundred prints from Tianjin Yang Qingliu, Suzhou Tao Huawu, Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, etc, from several collectors and organizations, as well as more than then sixteen hundred contemporary comic illustrations.

Dec 3, Seunghye Lee

campus Leave a Comment
Seunghye Lee

Ph.D. candidate, Art History
University of Chicago

Friday, December 3, 4- 6 pm
CWAC 156


Wholeness in the Face of Fragmentation: A Study of Wuyue Buddhist Relic Deposits

Abstract:

In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has examined the significance of the Buddhist relics from a variety of perspectives. Yet, it is often unclear what precisely the term “relics” refers to in the Chinese Buddhist context. In Chinese Buddhist texts, the term relics or sheli is often modified by other terms, implying the particular nature of the body of the Buddha present in the relic. This paper will investigate one of such terms, the “whole-body relics” or quanshen sheli, as conceptualized and materialized in the relic deposits of the Wuyue kingdom (907-978). I will offer two case studies in which the Yiqie rulaixin mimi quanshen sheli tuoluoni jing, a dharani-stura that involves the notion of the whole-body relics, played an important role. The first case is the printing of this dharani-stura and production of the miniature stupas, commissioned by Qian Hongchu (929-988), in the years between 955 and 965 AD. The second case is the relic deposits at Leifeng Pagoda for which the same sutras and miniature stupas were made but used in a different way in 970s.

Nov 19, Maki Fukuoka

campus Leave a Comment

Maki Fukuoka

Assistant Professor, Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Michigan

Friday, November 19, 4- 6 pm
CWAC 156

Site of transformation: Asakusa, Photographic Studios, and Media in Modern Japan

Abstract:

In the early days of Japan’s photographic history, the area known as Asakusa in the capital Tokyo became the hotspot for photographic studios. There, famous photographers such as Uchida Kyuichi, Kitaniwa Tsukuba, and Ezaki Reiji all opened their studios, and by the early 1880s, nearly forty studios congregated in this small area surrounding the landmark Asakusa Senso-ji Temple. Studios took portraits of the customers and also sold portraits of famous actors and courtesans who used these images to compete against one another. The photographic portraits taken at the studios in Asakusa and other photographic products convey the transformative aspects of portrait photography from this period.

But Asakusa had also been a unique area just a few decades before the studios were set up: the area was filled with street performances, spectacle shows, and noisy crowds. Did this play a role in attracting photographers to Asakusa? What made Asakusa a suitable place for this new enterprise, and what made it possible to sustain such an abundance of studios?

This paper explores the historical interconnection between the area of Asakusa and the practices of the photographic studios from the late nineteenth century Tokyo. It analyses the photographic studios in Asakusa as one thread in an intricate fabric that comprised the dynamic, lively, sometimes eccentric, and always innovative area of Asakusa. This paper proposes photographic studios as a burgeoning business practice that responded to, and was shaped by, the particular transformative sense that defined Asakusa. Incorporating newspaper articles, advertisements, and accounts by Asakusa residents, this project aims to explore how the photographic studios aligned themselves within the spaces of transformation, and how the strong presence of photographic studios themselves might have challenged the neighborhood of Asakusa.

Oct 22, Dorothy Wong

campus Leave a Comment

Dorothy Wong
Associate Professor, East Asian Art
University of Virginia

Friday, October 22, 4- 6 pm
CWAC 156

Divergent Paths: Early Representations of Amoghapasa in East, South and Southeast Asia

Amoghapāśa Avalokiteśvara (Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva with the Unfailing Rope; Chi. Bukongjuansuo Guanyi, J. Fukūkenjaku Kannon) is one of the manifestations of Avalokiteśvara, with widespread worship in India, the Himalayas, East and Southeast Asia from around the latter part of the seventh century. However, the beginnings of this bodhisattva in East Asia in the seventh and eighth centuries remain unclear, with only a small number of examples dating from this early period. And yet, the earliest extant representation of Amoghapāśa in Tōdaiji (dated around 748), Nara, attests to the significance attached to the cult of this bodhisattva. Through analysis of textual materials and selected examples, the paper aims to explore the paths of transmission of Amoghapāśa and the various factors shaping the representations of this bodhisattva in diverse regions in Asia. The study demonstrates that images of Amoghapāśa of relatively close dates but from disparate geographical regions have very little in common, and that they probably develop from different textual, stylistic and iconographic traditions. For instance, early representations of Amoghapāśa in East Asia seems to have been based on texts translated into Chinese at the time and developed within the local artistic traditions rather than on image types introduced from India.

June 5 Yuhang Li

campus Leave a Comment

Communicatig Guanyin with Hair: Hair Embroidery in the Late Imperial China

Yuhang Li
(PhD Candidate, EALC, University of Chicago)

Friday, June 5, 4:30p.m.
CWAC, 152

Abstract

Hair embroidery is a particular technique practiced by lay Buddhist women to create devotional images during late imperial China.  The embroiderers used their own hair as threads to stitch figures on silk.  They particularly stitched Guanyin, the most prevalent female deity in China.  In recent works on women’s talent, scholars have cursorily mentioned hair embroidery, but they have failed to study it in detail. In this chapter, based on textual references
and surviving hair embroidered Guanyin images, I explore the technique of hair embroidery, its religious connotations and then analyze the cultural significance of this practice. When women embroidered these images of Guanyin, they would create an object out of their hair, and put the product embodying an intimate part of their bodies in temples for all to see.  In this way, women sought favors from Guanyin, asking her, for instance, to heal illness or demonstrate their filial piety towards their parents.  Thus by offering a part of themselves to Guanyin, they attempted to be close to her.  Investigating such practices sheds light on how intimate and non-intimate realms were constituted in relation to religious practice in late imperial China.

May 28 Aida Yuen Wong

campus Leave a Comment

Kishida Ryūsei (1891-1929):  Painter of Sublime Imperfection

Aida Yuen Wong

(Assoicate Professor of Fine Arts, Brandeis University)

 

Thursday, May 28, 6:00 -8:00 PM

Joseph Regenstein Library, Seminar Room 207

 

Abstract

Kishida Ryūsei (1891-1929), a painter renowned for his unconventional approach to realism, produced an oeuvre that the casual viewer likely finds disturbing.  His distorted interpretations of Dürer and Jan van Eyck amounted to what the artist himself called “the Oriental grotesque.”  In an age when yōga (Western-style painting) was firmly established on the foundation of French (Post-)Impressionism, Kishida’s dark-toned still lifes and non-idealizing portraiture represented a major departure.  In the mundane, the imperfect, and the eery, he saw “internal beauty.”  How did Kishida arrive at this perspective?  What other sources besides the Northern Renaissance did he draw upon?  The talk traces his Asian references, exploring the moment when Japanese modernism was poised to challenge the hegemonic standards of its Western counterpart.  Possible connections with the Mingei (Folk-Craft) Movement will be investigated especially.

 

May 19 Stephanie H. Donald

campus Leave a Comment

Monumental Memories: A Discussion of Xu Weixin and his Pedagogic Art. Chinese Historical Figures, 1966-1976

Stephanie H. Donald

(Professor of Chinese Media Studies, University of Sydney)

Tuesday, 4:30-6:30 p.m. May 19

Joseph Regenstein Library, Seminar room 207

 

Abstract

 Physical, aesthetic and emotional traces of difficult times may be both formally elided and yet crucially embedded in contemporary practice in arts and media, and this is quite evidently so in Chinese   responses to the Cultural Revolution. This paper pays attention to the analysis of a series of images which have been constructed pedagogically and self-consciously to commemorate and enlighten the 80hou generation.  In this discussion I explore the status of image recall, trans-regional and trans-generational ways of seeing, and the status of history in the process of of looking through and for affect in making sense of the series. The artist Xu Weixin has attempted to create a pedagogical, yet monumental archive in paint, but he has also tried to suggest a redemptive relationship between them and now.  I discuss the role of mimesis in his work, and the degree to which we can understand these paintings as fragments of dialogue across generations, or as a soliloquy?

April 24 Stephanie Su

campus

Ruins and Travelers: The Representation of Roman Ruins in Yan Wenliang’s Work

Stephanie Su (Ph.D. student, University of Chicago)

Friday, 4:30-6:30 p.m. April 24

CWAC 152

 
Abstract:
This paper examines three representations of Roman ruins created by  the Chinese painter Yan Wenliang (1893-1988) in 1930. These three works are unique in early twentieth century Chinese art in terms of its subject matter. Yan studied art in Paris for two years from 1928 to 1930, and before he finished his education, he made a three-week trip to Italy with friends. Many Chinese artists of that time who studied in Europe also travel

Feb. 20, Jung-Ah Woo

campus Leave a Comment

“Home That Never Was: On Anxiety and Nostalgia of Korean Contemporary Artists”

Jung-Ah Woo

(Professor of art history in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, KAIST)

Friday, February 20, 4:00 -6:00 PM

CWAC 156

 

Abstract
This study investigates the works of three Korean artists: Suh Do-Ho, Kim Sooja, and Lee Bul. Since the early 1990s, these artists have emerged as visible figures in the international art scene, especially under the euphemistic rubric of nomadic identity and hybrid aesthetics. In other words, the body of their works was immediately embraced by the rapid influx of “postmodern” discourses to the Asian continent at the end of the century. Yet, the current military crises and financial catastrophes engulfing the entire globe complicate the understanding of such celebratory discourses of hybridity and nomadism. For the individuals living in this epoch of uncertainty, being hybrid and nomadic might invoke the fundamental anxiety of loss: loss of identity and original space.
The artists in this study have presented disparate modes of dealing with this sense of anxiety and nostalgia. I will argue that Suh generated nostalgia for his childhood home in Korea through architectures in fabric; Kim created an imagined location of origin in her video and performance; and Lee demonstrated her conscious rejection of melancholic attachment to organic body by offering cyborgs and monsters. These works clearly address the artists’ privatized memories, yet the individual processes of remembrance and representation offer a deeper understanding of the lost histories, as well as histories of loss in modern Korea.

Jan. 30, Gregory P. Levine

campus Leave a Comment

Silenced by Aesthetics?

Gregory P. Levine

(Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of California at Berkeley)

4:00-6:00 p.m. Jan. 30th, Friday 

CWAC 156

Abstract

What has Art History to do with Ecology? This paper considers art historical praxis in an age of ecological decline. How does art history, a system of knowledge, concern itself with systems of organisms and hibitats constituting planetary ecology? Do art historians practice according to Commoner’s dictum “…everything is connected to everything else” or Bateson’s relations over relata? How might art history contribute to ecological thingking, perhaps in ways that the natural sciences cannot? Can “art objects” be “ecological subjects”? Might an “eco-arthistory” move art history away from traditional binary structures?