Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia

We cordially invite you to join us on Wednesday, May 1, at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152 for our next VMPEA workshop. This workshop features:

Sizhao Yi

PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Melancholic Things in Chen Hongshou’s Sixteen Views of Living in Reclusion” 

Discussant: Yun-chen Lu

Assistant Professor, History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University

This workshop will take place in-person. Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

Image: Chen Hongshou, Album leaf from Sixteen Views of Living in Reclusion, 1651. National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Abstract:

In this talk, I will explore the affective effect of things in the visual repertoire of Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) through two paintings from the painter’s late masterpiece, the Sixteen Views of Living in Reclusion album. In these works, objects – a group of inkstones and a covered zither – are portrayed with rich yet peculiar details, interacting intimately with the figures. By closely attending to the pictorial details and analyzing them within the historical context,  I will suggest that these objects and their interactions with the figures delineate the nuances of the yimin sentiments towards the fallen Ming Dynasty among early Qing scholars. In fact, these objects are painted with such intentionality, subtlety and vividness that they visualize, materialize, and even animate the abstract mental state of melancholy. Through these objects, the viewer is not only reminded of but also let to reflect upon and even feel the past and its vestiges.

Bios:

Sizhao Yi is a PhD candidate specializing in the visual and material culture of Late Imperial China. Her dissertation engages with issues of material and materiality, image making, intermediality, and the agency of things through the lenses of Chen Hongshou’s artistic practices and his engagements with material artifacts. Prior to starting her PhD, she received a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Hong Kong, and an MA from the University of Chicago. She also interned at the textile conservation department in the Archaeology Institute at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She currently serves as the Rhoades Curatorial Intern and Frankenthaler/Taylor Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Yun-chen Lu is an Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at DePaul University. She specializes in Chinese painting and calligraphy, visual and material culture, artists with disabilities, and East Asian interregional 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 China. Before joining DePaul University in 2022, she was a predoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art.

We cordially invite you to join us on Wednesday, April 17, for the second VMPEA workshop of the quarter, taking place at our usual time at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152. This workshop will feature:

Elvin Meng

PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature & EALC, UChicago

Discussant: Peter Kornicki

Emeritus Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Cambridge

Visiting Professor, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Fragments into Voice into Fragments:

Manuscript Culture and the Nineteenth-Century Manchu Curriculum”

This event will take place in-person. For participants who would like to join via Zoom, please register here. Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you in CWAC 152!

Abstract

Drawing on a genre of Sino-Manchu manuscripts I frequently encounter in archival research, this presentation gives a preliminary sketch of the entanglements between materiality (the production, circulation, and consumption of print and manuscript texts), sociality (which can be pedagogical, bureaucratic, commercial, familial), and semiotics (translatability, orality, authenticity) in nineteenth-century Sino-Manchu language pedagogical practice. Although I will give my tentative reconstruction of the typical Manchu language curriculum in private bannered schools in late-Qing Beijing, the focus of my presentation will be on a single genre of students’ materials—collections of short, vernacular dialogues known in Manchu as meyen and in Vernacular Sinitic as huatiaozi 話條子—that young children copied, read aloud, and memorized from day to day in these schools. Certain collections of meyen were put to print throughout the Qing period, but the genre primarily circulated in the form of manuscripts, as they were constantly modified, exchanged, or written anew in classrooms, familial or friend circles, or the book market.

The proliferation of meyen in nineteenth-century Beijing manuscript culture, then, requires an analysis across multiple levels—material, textual, social, institutional, conceptual, etc.—that present challenges. The complication is increased by the fact that little is recorded of the historical use of meyen texts except on/as the extant meyen artifacts themselves. As I am in the early stages of thinking through this genre of manuscripts, this talk will focus on some basic but important questions: What are their typical material features? What was their place in Manchu language education, which was in effect an education in Sino-Manchu translation? What did their readers do with them? What can be known about their production and circulation? In asking these questions, I will be led to also investigate the place of meyen in the conceptual-material ecology of Manchu writing at large, as the meyen genre played an important role in the Qing politicization of the texture, voicing, and history of language itself.

Bio

Elvin Meng is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research interests include intellectual history, media theory, translation studies, and early modern Northeast Asia.

Peter Kornicki is emeritus professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Cambridge and currently a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Languages, Scripts and Chinese Texts in East Asia (2018), Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain’s War with Japan (2021) and many other works.

Dear all,

We cordially invite you to VMPEA workshop’s first event of the winter quarter, co-sponsored with East Asia: Transregional Histories (EATRH) workshop, taking place Thursday, January 25, from 4-5:30pm CT at SSRB Tea Room (Room 201, 1126 E 59th St). This event will be featuring:

Dr. Rachel Silberstein

Who will be presenting the paper

“’The Seventy-Two Kinds’: The Cloth Classic and the Jiangnan Cotton Finishing Sector”

Discussant: Yin Cai

PhD Candidate, History, UChicago

Please note that there is a pre-circulated paper for this workshop, available here under the password “XiuMianFuRong”.

This event will be a hybrid event, and registration is necessary. If you wish to join on Zoom, please register at this link. Please see below for the abstract for Dr. Silberstein’s talk.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Yours,

Yan & Alan

*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.

Abstract

Economic historians have asserted that Jiangnan cotton fabrics improved in quality through the Qing period, allowing those producers who focused upon styles, colors, and fashion to earn better profits and leading to numerous different options – the “seventy-two kinds”. But what techniques were used to create those styles, colors, and fashions, and to what extent did the finishing sector of the cotton industry – the dyers and the calenderers – rather than the weavers, enable this purported expansion of styles and increase in profits? The notion that coloring and finishing options expanded for the ordinary people who wore cotton cloth is an intriguing proposition in relation to several historical debates, including comparative living standards, commercialization of the cotton industry, and the history of Asian dye technologies. However, though the vast majority of Qing Chinese would have worn cotton or ramie, these claims cannot be substantiated through material culture history: the biases of collecting and material survival mean that extant cotton garments are rare and studies of Qing dress are dominated by silk.

Accordingly, The Cloth Classic (布经), an late eighteenth-century compendium of advice and experience written by a cloth merchant for cloth merchants, possesses considerable value for understanding the causes and impact of advances in cotton finishing. It contains a long and detailed section on cloth dyeing, including 68 recipes for different colors, a surprisingly large number given the assumption that societies with indigenous cotton production like China could only dye indigo blue or tannin brown due to the difficulties of dyeing cellulosic cottons, unlike proteinaceous silks and woolens. This paper analyzes the dyeing and calendering content of The Cloth Classic within the context of developments in the Qing period Jiangnan cotton industry. By evaluating four factors that potentially drove the expansion of the finishing sector: technical innovations, dyestuff trade, commercial organization, and consumer demand, I use this commercial text to redress the unrepresentative material archive, to verify the existence of the “seventy-two kinds,” and to provide insights into the economic and cultural significance of the Jiangnan dyeing and calendering workshops.