Yun-chen Lu, “A Left-Turn to Artistic Eccentricity: Gao Fenghan (1683–1749) and Disability Art in Eighteenth-century Yangzhou”

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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.

Wu Hung, “Outdoor Exhibitions in Beijing, 1979”

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Professor Wu Hung will be at the VMPEA & APEA joint workshop on April 28th (Friday) from 4pm-6pm CT at CWAC 152 to share his latest research titled “Outdoor Exhibitions in Beijing, 1979,” and Professor Paola Iovene will offer a response. Please note that there is a pre-circulated paper for this workshop, available here under the password “outdoor.” If you would like to join us for the reception from 6pm-8pm CT, please kindly RSVP by April 25 (Tuesday).

 

Wu Hung

presenting:

“Outdoor Exhibitions in Beijing, 1979,”

with a response from Paola Iovene

 

April 28th (Friday), 4pm-6pm CT, 2023

Cochrane-Woods Art Center, 152

*This workshop will be livestreamed on Zoom, please use this link if you plan to attend virtually. No registration is required. Pw: outdoor.

An outdoor art exhibition in Beijing, 1979.

 

Abstract

In most writing about contemporary Chinese art, the primary significance of the Stars Art Exhibition (1979) is believed to lie in its choice of venue: held in the small street park outside of the National Art Gallery of China, it moved the site of art exhibition from indoors to outdoors and from museums to public space, displaying works of young “outsider” artists to street crowds. This emphasis on location is undoubtedly correct, but because many studies discuss this exhibition as a singular event, they ignore its relationship to other artistic activities at the time. As a result, the interpretation is frequently skewed, either overemphasizing its uniqueness or overlooking its specificity. An important artistic phenomenon in Beijing in 1979 was the occurrence of multiple outdoor art exhibitions, which have not yet received sufficient scholarly attention. This study attempts to assemble the available materials to provide a general introduction to these exhibitions, to reflect on their shared historical context and characteristics, and to reexamine the Stars Art Exhibition within this context.

 

Wu Hung holds the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professorship at the Department of Art History and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, and is also the director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the same university. An elected member of the American Academy of Art and Science and the American Philosophic Society, he sits on multiple domestic and international committees. He has received many awards for his publications and academic services, including the Distinguished Teaching Award (2008) and Distinguished Scholar Award (2018) from the College of Art Association (CAA), an Honorary Degree in Arts from Harvard University (2019), and the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art from CAA (2022). Wu Hung’s research interests include both traditional and contemporary Chinese art, and he has published many books and curated many exhibitions in these two fields. His interdisciplinary interest has led him to experiment with different ways to tell stories about Chinese art, as exemplified by his Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (1995), The Double Screen: Medium and Representation of Chinese Pictorial Art (1996), Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square: the Creation of a Political Space (2005), The Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs (2010), A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (2012), Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (2016), and Space in Art History (2018). His three newest books from 2022 and 2023 include Chinese and Dynastic time (Princeton University Press), Spatial Dunhuang: Experiencing the Mogao Caves (Washington University Press), and The Full Length Mirror: A Global Visual History (Reaktion Books).

 

Paola Iovene is an associate professor of modern Chinese literature in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China (2014) and the editor of Cultures of Labor in Contemporary China (Special issue of positions: asia critique, May 2023).

Zhiyan Yang, “Exhibiting Contemporary Architecture of China: Experiments and Cross-Cultural Dialogues, 1995-2005”

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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”

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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

Juliane Noth, “Debating the Past and the Future of Chinese Art at the Hangzhou National Art School”

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Please join us this Thursday, March 23, from 4:45 pm-6:45 pm CT at the Cochrane Woods Art Center (CWAC) 156 for the first VMPEA workshop this spring, generously sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with support from a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center Grant, featuring:

 

Juliane Noth

Professor of East Asian Art History, Freie Universität Berlin

Who will be presenting the paper

“Debating the Past and the Future of Chinese Art at the Hangzhou National Art School, 1928–1937”

*Please note the unusual date of this meeting. You can also use this link to join the talk on Zoom. No registration is required. The password is “arth”

Cover of the journal Apollo, no. 17 (1936), special issue on the graduation of the fourth class

 

Abstract

The Hangzhou National Art School was founded with the goal to establish a modern art education following the Beaux-Arts model and to realize the concept of “aesthetic education” envisioned by the minister of education, Cai Yuanpei. Most of the young faculty around director Lin Fengmian (1900–1998) had only recently returned from their own studies in France. Together they aimed at establishing a modern program for training artists in China. In the art school’s journal’s, they engaged in controversial debates about the situation of the Chinese artworld, about how to interpret the history of Chinese art, and how it could be saved for the future. I will discuss these debates together with the curriculum and the work within the studios of the art school, and outline how historiography and practice informed each other.

Juliane Noth is Professor of East Asian Art History at Freie Universität Berlin. The focus of her research is on twentieth-century Chinese art, on how it was redefined with regard to historical practices as well as global entanglements, and on its institutional frameworks. Her latest monograph, Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting, was recently published as a Harvard East Asian Monograph in 2022.

 

Hope to see many of you there,

Lucien Sun and Li Jiang

VMPEA Coordinators, 2022–2023

VMPEA Spring Schedule

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The Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia (VMPEA) workshop is pleased to announce the Spring 2023 schedule. All the in-person events will meet on selected Wednesdays from 4:45 to 6:45 pm CT at Cochrane-Woods Art Center 152 unless otherwise noted. For the online events or those who would like to join us remotely for the in-person events, we will send out the registration link prior to these events. You are welcome to consult the VMPEA website for further information about these events, and please subscribe to our listserv here to receive event notifications.

 

Spring 2023 Schedule

 

March 23

Juliane Noth, Professor of East Asian Art History, Freie Universität Berlin

“Debating the Past and the Future of Chinese Art at the Hangzhou National Art School, 1928–1937”

[This event is on Thursday at 4:45–6:45pm]

 *This event is co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with support from a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center Grant.

 

April 7 

Wang Zonghui, Visiting PhD Candidate, UChicago

“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.

[This event is on Friday at 4:45–6:45pm]

 

April 19

Zhiyan Yang, PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

“Exhibiting Contemporary Architecture of China: Experiments and Cross-Cultural Dialogues, 1995–2005”

 

April 26

Alice Casalini, PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

“Things that Look Back: the Malleable Space of Gandharan Art”

*This event is co-sponsored by RAVE workshop.

 

April 28

Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College, UChicago

“Outdoor Exhibitions in Beijing, 1979”

 [This event is on Friday at 4–6pm]

*This event is co-sponsored by APEA workshop.

If you are interested in attending the reception after the workshop, please RSVP.

 

May 3

Lu Yun-chen, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University

Title TBD

 

May 17

Sizhao Yi, PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

“Material Encounters: Chen Hongshou’s Early Paintings of Objects”

 

Please feel free to contact Lucien (lesun@uchicago.edu) and Li (jiangli@uchicago.edu) with any questions you might have, and we look forward to seeing many of you at the workshops!

 

All the best,

Lucien Sun and Li Jiang

VMPEA Coordinators, 2022–2023

VMPEA WINTER 2023 SCHEDULE

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The Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia (VMPEA) workshop is pleased to announce the Winter 2023 schedule. All the in-person events will meet on selected Wednesdays from 4:45 to 6:45 pm CT at Cochrane-Woods Art Center 152 unless otherwise noted. For the online events or those who would like to join us remotely for the in-person events, we will send out the registration link prior to these events. You are welcome to consult the VMPEA website for further information about these events, and please subscribe to our listserv here to receive event notifications.

 

Winter 2023 Schedule 

 

January 12

Sylvia Wu, PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

“Inventing Lingshan’s Ritual Environments: Muslim Devotional Practices in Little Ice Age Quanzhou”

[This is an online event, and we will meet from 4:45–6:45pm]

 

January 25

Martin Bai, MAPH Student, UChicago

“Song literati mural paintings: a ‘mirror-medium’ and new research on Su Shi”

February 8

Ricarda Brosch, PhD Candidate, History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art & Assistant Curator, V&A

“The Pictures of Ancient Playthings 古玩圖 Revisited: imperial art for the afterlife?”

[This is an online event, and we will meet from 11:30am–1:30pm]

March 1

Zhiyan Yang, PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago

“Exhibiting Contemporary Architecture of China: Experiments and Cross-Cultural Dialogues, 1995–2005”

 

Please feel free to contact Lucien (lesun@uchicago.edu) and Li (jiangli@uchicago.edu) with any questions you might have, and we look forward to seeing many of you at the workshops!

Anthony Stott, Nov 18

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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.

 

**************

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.