Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia

Delin Lai, PhD, Professor and Head of Art History Program, Department of Fine Art, the University of Louisville

“Regionality: A Resistant Issue and Keyword in Modern Chinese Architecture”

Respondent: Zhiyan Yang, PhD Candidate, Department of Art History

Friday, February 28, 2020

4:30-6:30 pm, CWAC 152

Refreshments and a catered dinner will be provided

Abstract: This paper decodes various manifestations of “regionality”, an important issue and keyword in modern Chinese architectural history. It argues that each manifestation was a response to cultural, political, social, or even professional challenges faced by architectural scholars, officials, or practitioners. The notion of regionality thus may be interpreted as strategies of criticism or resistance. As “vernacular architecture” it was to criticize monument-dominated historical study, as “the study of local geography” to resist the International Style, as “regional styles” to resist the monopoly of the state discourse, as “Critical Regionalism” or “land-based rationalism” to resist the hegemony of globalized architectural practice, and as “cultural-oriented regionalism” to strive for self-justification in the competition for a national expression.

Li Xiaodong Atelier, Bridge School, Xiaoshi Village, Pinghe County, Fujian, 2009

This event is sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the United States Department of Education.

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Zhenru Zhou (zhenru@zhenruzhou.com) and Yin Wu (yinwu@uchicago.edu).

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Delin Lai is an alumnus of the University of Chicago. He studied modern Chinese architecture under the guidance of Professors Wu Hung and Katherine Taylor in the Department of Art History, and graduated in 2007. He is now professor of art history at the University of Louisville. Delin specializes in modern Chinese cities and architecture and their relationship with nationalism, modernism, and Western influence. His publications include Jindai Zhejiang Lu (Who’s who in modern Chinese architecture, 2006), Zhongguo Jindai Jianzhushi Yanjiu (Studies in modern Chinese architecture, 2007), Minguo Lizhi Jianzhu yu Zhongshan Jinian (Ritual architecture in republican China and the cult of Sun Yat-sen, 2012), Zhongguo Jindai Sixiangshi yu Jianzhu Shixueshi (Changing ideals in modern China and its historiography of architecture, 2016), and the papers “Searching for a Modern Chinese Monument: the design of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing, 1925-1929” and “Idealizing a Chinese Style: Rethinking Early Writings on Chinese Architecture and the Design of the National Central Museum in Nanjing” in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. He is the Lead Editor of the five-volume book Zhongguo Jindai Jianzhushi (History of Modern Chinese Architecture, 2016).

Zhiyan Yang is a doctoral candidate specializing in the history of modern and contemporary East Asian Architecture. He is currently writing a dissertation on post-socialist architecture in China and its various cultural applications and reflections, including exhibits, journals, history writing and its intersection with contemporary visual culture and art. He received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 2013 and M.A. from the University of Chicago in 2015. Zhiyan has been 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.

Nancy P. Lin, PhD candidate, Department of Art History

“‘That artwork doesn’t exist’: Productive misreadings of performance documentation and what happens when you find out the ‘truth’”

Thursday, February 20, 2020

12:30 to 1:50 pm, CWAC 152

Co-sponsored with Speaking of Art: Artist Interviews in Scholarship and Practice

Lunch will be provided

Abstract: Multi-media contemporary artist Song Dong’s Writing Time with Water (Lhasa) (1996) exemplifies the artist’s longstanding performance actions featuring water as an artistic medium. Standing on the shores of the Lhasa River in Tibet, Song used an ink brush dipped in river water to mark each year of Lhasa’s 1,300-year history on 1,300 found stones, tossing each into the water and taking a photograph each time the stone is thrown. Along with several other works the artist created between 1996 and 1997, Writing Time (Lhasa) exemplifies the ways in which Song understood the relationship between action and trace, performance and documentation, while also articulating an expanded site-specific approach that links Lhasa to Beijing and Hong Kong. These points, based on archival photographs and video footage, have all been argued in my previous writings about Song Dong and the work. One aspect that hasn’t been considered, however, is the fact that this artwork doesn’t exist—not no-longer-extant, but in fact, never made. My talk reflects upon an instance of accidentally writing about a non-existent work as a way to ponder the methodological issues concerning artwork, documentation, and the artist interview. Where all can we locate the performance “artwork” and what evidentiary role can the artist interview play?

Writing Time with Water Lhasa, color photograph, 1996. © Beijing Commune

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Zhenru Zhou (zhenru@zhenruzhou.com) and Yin Wu (yinwu@uchicago.edu).

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Nancy P. Lin studies modern and contemporary Chinese art and architecture. She received her B.A. with highest honors in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation focuses on the intersection of art, architecture, and urban visual culture in examining the spatial and site-oriented artistic practices of Chinese contemporary artists in the 1990s. She received the 2015 Schiff Foundation Writing Fellowship and, together with fellow collaborators, was a recipient of the 2016 Graham Foundation project grant for the forthcoming publication Building Subjects, a survey of collective housing in China. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Curatorial Intern at the Smart Museum of Art and was previously a fellow of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Urban Art and Urban Form from 2017-2018. Her article on the Big Tail Elephant artist group is included in the edited volume Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interfaces (Amsterdam University Press, 2018).

Panpan Yang, PhD candidate, Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations

“Ink on Screen, or What Animation Calls Thinking”

Respondent: W. J. T. Mitchell, PhD, Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor, English and Art History

Friday, January 17, 2020

4:30-6:30 pm, CWAC 152

Co-sponsored with Mass Culture Workshop

Refreshments and a catered dinner will be provided

Abstract: This presentation reanimates the history of ink animation (水墨動畫) from the 1960s to the present. In its two golden eras, Shanghai Animation Studio produced some extremely exquisite ink animated films, such as Herdboy and the Flute (1963) and Feeling from Mountain and Water (1988). Most frames of these ink animated films, if frozen, are Chinese landscape paintings (山水畫, sometimes translated as “mountain-and-water paintings”). I show that the animated landscapes in the distinct genre of Chinese animation importune contemplation on space and time to a degree unthinkable in either live-action cinema or traditional “motionless” landscape images in painting, photography, and other media. Segueing into the recent trend of experimental ink animation, this talk also addresses how animation, in all its mobility, moves in and out of the sphere of contemporary Chinese art.

Herdboy and the Flute (Shanghai Animation Studio, 1963). Courtesy of the China Film Archive.

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Zhenru Zhou (zhenru@zhenruzhou.com) and Yin Wu (yinwu@uchicago.edu).

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Panpan Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint program in Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations. She studies East Asian cinema, media, and visual arts. Her dissertation, of which today’s talk is a part, examines Chinese animation in relation to other art forms. Supported by UChicago Arts, she is also working on a work of experimental animation, which animates a series of “wave and ripple” drawings from Hamonshū, a 1903 Japanese design book by little known artist Mori Yuzan.

J. T. Mitchell is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English Language and Literature, and Art History. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues.

Jennifer Dorothy Lee, PhD, Assistant Professor of East Asian Art, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

“Ideology of the Image: Wu Guanzhong’s Abstract Expression in Early Post-Mao China”

Respondent: Orianna Cacchione, PhD, Curator of Global Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art

Friday, November 22, 2019

4:30-6:30 pm, CWAC 156

Abstract: Discrepant abstraction has become a fulcrum of comparative “global” art histories, and this presentation enters the fray. Outside of contemporary China, abstraction maintains intellectual baggage redolent of Meyer Schapiro’s line about paintings “made up of colors and shapes, representing nothing.” Continuing a discussion conducted in the first “Writing & Picturing in Post-1945 Asian Art” symposium hosted by the University of Chicago in 2017, my paper reintroduces the painter Wu Guanzhong (吴冠中, 1919-2010) through a new critical lens that emphasizes Wu’s controversial writings and institutional critique from the late 1970s. Through Wu, I argue that abstraction in twentieth century China carried connotations distinct from its resonances in the North Atlantic, which inform how the concept can be understood in globalizing cultural discourses today. More specifically, I address how Wu Guanzhong repurposed abstraction for critical discourse in China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). In this historical moment, institutional and political elites in Beijing regarded painterly abstraction with great suspicion, owing to its associations with the bourgeois-capitalist art worlds of Paris and New York. I show how Wu Guanzhong performed an intriguing series of aesthetic interventions through his writings, utilizing Maoist logic to reposition abstraction as a politically neutralized concept. Once filtered through the language of radical materialism, abstraction ultimately took hold as a renewed term of engagement in the early post-Mao art world by the 1980s.

Wu Guanzhong, Roots, 1980. Chinese ink and colour on paper, 96 x 179.5 cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Heritage Board.

This event is sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the United States Department of Education.

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Zhenru Zhou (zhenru@zhenruzhou.com) and Yin Wu (yinwu@uchicago.edu).

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Bio:

Jennifer Dorothy Lee is Assistant Professor of East Asian Art in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In Spring 2020 Lee will serve as Getty Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Lee’s research focus encompasses social history and comparative and transnational perspectives on China, critical area studies of Asia, as well as theories of socialism. Lee’s first book project, Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985, offers a sustained study of aesthetic theory, art, and subjectivity redefined in the fleeting historical moment bridging the Mao era with Dengist reforms.

Orianna Cacchione is Curator of Global Contemporary Art, at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Her curatorial practice is committed to expanding the canon of contemporary art to respond to the global circulations of art and ideas.The recent exhibitions that Cacchione curated at the Smart Museum include Tang Chang: The Painting that Is Painted with Poetry Is Profoundly Beautiful, and Samson Young: Silver Moon or Golden Star, Which Will You Buy of Me? Prior to joining the Smart Museum, Cacchione was Curatorial Fellow for East Asian Contemporary Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Michael J. Hatch, PhD, Assistant Professor of East Asian Art History, Department of Art, Miami University

“Epigraphy, Ruan Yuan, and the Haptic Imagination in Early Nineteenth-Century Chinese Painting”

Respondent: Meng Zhao, PhD Candidate, Department of Art History, University of Chicago

Friday, November 8, 2019

4:30-6:30 pm, CWAC 156

Refreshments and a catered dinner will be provided

Abstract: The study of ancient cast and inscribed objects among early nineteenth-century literati brought together the senses of vision and touch. Scholars, officials, and artists obsessively documented texts and images found on degraded stone steles or oxidized bronzes. As they did so their brushwork increasingly emulated the effects of aging on these materials. This epigraphic aesthetic bridged media through visual and conceptual languages that were applied as readily to stone and metal inscriptions as they were to paintings and calligraphy. Scholars began to see in terms that were tactile.

Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), one of the early nineteenth-century’s most influential government officials and scholars, was central to this. His essays, “The Northern and Southern Schools of Calligraphy,” and “Northern Steles, Southern Letters,” provide the clearest articulation of the values at the core of the epigraphic aesthetic. Likewise, paintings, inkstones, and rubbings produced within his broad network of friends and aides attest to the manifestation of an early nineteenth-century haptic imagination across media.

This paper is excerpted from the speaker’s book manuscript, The Senses of Painting in China, 1790-1840, a sensory history that explores the appeals to embodied memory made in early nineteenth-century literati painting through allusions to touch, sound, and smell.

Liuzhou (1791—1858), Full-Form Rubbing of A Wild-Goose-Foot-Shaped Lamp, 47.8*26cm

This event is sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the United States Department of Education.

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Zhenru Zhou (zhenru@zhenruzhou.com) and Yin Wu (yinwu@uchicago.edu).

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Michael J. Hatch is an Assistant Professor of East Asian art at Miami University in Ohio. He earned a PhD in Art and Architecture from Princeton University in 2015. Prof. Hatch has held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Princeton University Art Museum. Before graduate school, he worked in auctions and galleries, spending three years in Beijing at China Guardian Auctions and one year in New York at Kaikodo Gallery.

His research focuses on the interplay between sensuous, material, and intellectual modes of viewing Chinese painting, and ranges from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century. His current book manuscript is The Senses of Painting in China, 1790-1840. He has articles forthcoming in Archives of Asian Art and the Metropolitan Museum Journal.

Meng Zhao is a PhD candidate at the Department of Art History, University of Chicago. She studies Chinese art with a particular focus on painting practice of Middle Period China (ca. 800-1400). Meng received her BA in Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University and her MA in History of Art and Archaeology of East Asia at SOAS University of London. Her master’s dissertation addressed a dramaturgical schema activated by the act of gazing frequently depicted in the Southern Song (1127-1279) court painting. Meng is particularly interested in the tension between the understanding of paintings as self-knowledge and the social dimensions of aesthetic mentalities, and in the sensuous credibility of pictorial representation of the middle period.

Friday, October 25, 4:30-6:30 pm, the Cochrane-Woods Art Center (CWAC) Room 156.

Peter Chen, MA student, Divinity School

“What does Chinese look like? Secularization as/and Nationalism in the case of Feng Zikai”

Respondent: Minori Egashira, PhD student, Department of Art History

A pre-circulated paper can be found at the link, pin: zikai.

Co-sponsored with Arts and Politics of East Asia (APEA) Workshop

This paper attempts to link broader theoretical discussions regarding secularization with the formation of nationalism and “Chinese-ness” in contemporary China. In particular, I focus here on the contemporary afterlife of Feng Zikai 豐子愷 (1898 – 1975) in the PRC through the China Dream campaign 中國夢posters and in Taiwan through religious murals at Foguangshan 佛光山. While the China Dream posters represent Feng Zikai as a secular figure, the murals at Foguangshan paint him as a Chinese Buddhist exemplar. Furthermore, while the China Dream campaign has preserved the ink and watercolor style of Feng Zikai’s original manhua (漫畫), Foguangshan has transformed his work into the ceramic religious murals, similar to those commonly found in popular religious temples in China and Taiwan. The paper attempts to interrogate under what structures and conditions these types of images make sense and accordingly, how they fit into current discourses surrounding what constitutes Chinese-ness. Thus, I first outline how figures such as Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962) first laid down theoretical and conceptual paradigms concerning secularism and Chinese-ness in order to understand how these frameworks still function today. In short, starting from Hu Shi’s writings on the history of Chinese philosophy and religion, a discourse connecting secularism and ‘Chinese-ness’ emerges, and that this intertwining of secularism and the narrative concerning the state of Chinese culture critically informs these two re-interpretations of Feng Zikai’s work in order to produce two contrasting visual depictions of ‘Chinese-ness.’

A popular China Dream poster with an image of Feng Zikai’s manhua.

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Zhenru Zhou (zhenru@zhenruzhou.com) and Yin Wu (yinwu@uchicago.edu).

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Peter Chen is a MA student at the Divinity School. His current research interests revolve around secularism, nationalism, visual culture, and the formation and differentiation of knowledge production in modern East Asia. Prior to coming to University of Chicago, he spent a year between Hangzhou and Beijing on a Fulbright grant, conducting research on Feng Zikai. Moving forward, he is interested in how the secular and the religious intersect with the formations of the social sciences and political theory in China, as seen through Buddhist historiography, late Qing political thought, Maoism, and Cold War propaganda posters.

Minori Egashira is a PhD student at the Department of Art History. She studies Japanese art history, with a focus on Meiji-period (1868–1912) sculpture. She is interested in how Japanese artworks were transferred to the West and their reception by both the West and Japan. She received her BA in art history from Wake Forest University in 2014, and her MA from Kyushu University in 2017. She completed her MA thesis on changing perceptions of Meiji-period artists during their lifetimes and the reception of their artworks. Specifically, she examined Buddhist wood sculptor and professor Takenouchi Hisakazu (1857–1916, alt. Takeuchi Kyūichi) and the lacunae of scholarship on him.

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are excited to share an upcoming special event hosted by VMPEA! On Next Friday, October 11 at 4:30-6:30pm in CWAC 156, Jiayi Zhu (EALC), Sylvia Wu and Sizhao Yi (Art History), three PhD students who participated at the UChicago/Getty Traveling Seminar in summer 2019 will share their observations and reflections on the trip. Let’s kick of the new academic year by joining their round-table style presentations of “Cave art from Xi’an to Dunhuang: Observations from the UChicago/Getty Traveling Seminar”! Apart from fresh ideas and visual materials, there will be plenty of refreshments and pizza.

Warmly,

Zhenru & Yin

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UChicago/Getty Traveling Seminar visiting Mogao Cave 85, Dunhuang, China, August 2019. Photo by Li Yuxuan.

Persons with concerns regarding accessibility please contact Zhenru Zhou (zhenru@zhenruzhou.com) and Yin Wu (yinwu@uchicago.edu).

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Jiayi Zhu is PhD student at the East Asian Languages & Civilizations Department. Her area of study is Medieval China, Japan and Korea. Jiayi received her BA from Middlebury College (Anthropology and Environmental Studies) in 2014, and her MA from Columbia University (East Asian Buddhism) in 2017. Her research focuses on Esoteric Buddhism and Buddhist art in East Asia from 7th to 10th century.

Sylvia Wu is a PhD student in Islamic art and architecture. Her primary research interests revolve around the medieval Indian Ocean trade routes, a network connecting the coastal areas of East and South Asia, the Gulf, and East Africa. She seeks to foreground the dynamics of cultural activities seen in these regions that have been traditionally deemed outside of, or on the rims of the so-called Dar al-Islam. Through examining the artistic enterprises sponsored, executed, and used by individuals and communities with diverse backgrounds, Sylvia aspires to construe the transmission of knowledge within and beyond the network, which facilitated, or was formed by, the regional visual and material cultures. Sylvia received her MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University with a thesis on imperial Ottoman silks. She has interned in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sizhao Yi is a PhD student in East Asian art and material culture with a particular interest in objects from late imperial China. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Hong Kong in 2016, and her MA from the University of Chicago in 2017. Her master’s thesis examined two embroidered jackets excavated from an imperial tomb of the Ming Dynasty, which she encountered during her internship at the textile conservation department in the Archeology Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.