Visiting Scholar Special Workshop: Dong Rui

Yifan Zou Leave a Comment

Dong Rui. PhD., Visiting Scholar, Department of Art History, University of Chicago; Associate Professor, School of Fine Arts, Henan University

 

Nostalgia for Inner Asia: Form and Idea in the Portrait of the Filial Grandson Yuan Gu on Stone Funerary Couch from the Eastern Wei Dynasty (548 CE)
内亚的留恋：安阳东魏围屏石棺床孝孙原榖画像的形式与理念

 

Discussant: Lin Wei-Cheng, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, University of Chicago

Friday, Nov 13th, 2020
5-7 pm, Zoom meeting (please find the registration link below)
This talk will be delivered in Chinese

Abstract: This study focuses on two illustrations of filial grandson Yuan Gu story from an Eastern Wei stone screen attached to a stone funerary couch. This stone funerary couch was excavated in 2007 from Tomb M57 (548 CE) in Anyang, Henan Province. Notably, one illustration of filial grandson Yuan Gu departed from its iconographic convention but presented the theme with Yuan Gu’s parents carrying an empty stretcher, with a standing female figure on the side. A closer examination of this unique illustration of the “filial grandson Yuan Gu” theme will shed light on a more nuanced understanding of Northern Wei rulers’ promotion of Confucianism and their attachment to Inner Asian traditions.

摘要：2007年，在河南省安阳发掘了一座东魏时期的（公元548年）夫妇合葬墓M57， 出土文物中包含了一座刻有二幅孝孙原榖等12幅画像的围屏石棺床。尤为特别的是，其中一幅孝孙原榖画像中，原榖父母所抬的是一副无人的担架，但在担架旁边站立着一女性，这种形式是目前所见孝孙原榖画像中的孤例。该画像从一个侧面反映了北魏统治者在入主中原后对儒家文化的有限接受和对内亚传统文化的留恋。这一实物或许可以从一个新的侧面折射出鲜卑大力推行汉化，却最终还是失败的原因。

2007年河南安阳固岸墓地M57号东魏墓，夫妇合葬石棺床

 

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUodeuhpz0uGdGtJN_GcvLlX92vBSavtu5H

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dong Rui received his PhD from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2013. From 2005 to 2013, he worked in the office of South–North Water Transfer Project of Henan Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau. In 2013 he starts to work at Henan University in the School of Fine Art as an associate professor, and is currently a visiting scholar with the University of Chicago. His publications appear in a number of journals including Journal of Zhengzhou University, Art History Research, and Huaxia Archaeology. Hs is also the author of The Research of Hollow brick tombs in Han dynasty 汉代空心砖墓研究 (2019).

Wei-Cheng Lin is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Lin specializes in the history of Chinese art and architecture, with a focus on medieval period, and has published on both Buddhist and funeral art and architecture of medieval China. His first book, Building a Sacred Mountain: Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount Wutai, was published in 2014 with the University of Washington Press. He has also written on topics related to traditional architecture in modern China. Lin is currently working on two book projects: Performative Architecture of China, explores architecture’s performative potential through history and the meanings enacted through such architectural performance. Necessarily Incomplete: Fragments of Chinese Artifacts investigate fragments of Chinese artifacts, as well as the cultural practices they solicited and engaged, to locate their agentic power in generating the multivalent significance of those artifacts, otherwise undetectable or overlooked.

Dorothy C. Wong, NOV 6

Yifan Zou Leave a Comment

Speaker: Dorothy C. Wong (Professor, Mcintire Department of Art, University of Virginia)

“Colossal Buddha Statues in China, Past and Present”

Discussant: Jiayi Zhu (PhD student, EALC, University of Chicago)

Friday, Nov 6, 2020
4:45-6:45 pm, Zoom meeting (please find the registration link below)

Abstract:
Beginning in the northwestern region of India, and spreading through Central Asia and the rest of Asia along the Silk Road, the making of colossal Buddha statues has been a major theme in Buddhist art. The colossal Buddha statues predominantly feature Śākyamuni (the Historical Buddha), Maitreya (the Future Buddha), and Vairocana (the Transcendant Buddha), and they were fashioned out of religious devotion and frequently in conjunction with notions of Buddhist kingship. This paper examines the religious, social and political circumstances under which these colossal statues were made, primarily focusing on examples in China made during the first millennium CE. Beginning in the 1990s, there was a revival of making colossal Buddha statues across China and elsewhere. The second part of the paper attempts to address the contemporary phenomenon in China in relation to issues surrounding cultural heritage, religious and cultural identity, ownership, commodification, pilgrimage, and tourism.


Tzu Shan Monastery, Tai Po District, Hong Kong.

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0rc–ppz0tHNN9O2rKC6BH_FF27A80D9Jj

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dorothy Wong is currently Professor of Art and Director of the East Asia Center at the University of Virginia. Specializing in Buddhist art of medieval China, Dorothy Wong’s research addresses topics of art in relation to religion and society, and of the relationship between religious texts/doctrine and visual representations. In addition to many articles, she has published Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and Buddhist Use of a Symbolic Form (2004; Chinese edition 2011), Hōryūji Reconsidered (editor and contributing author, 2008) China and Beyond in the Medieaval Period: Cultural Crossings and Inter-regional Connections (co-editor with Gustav Heldt, and contributing author, 2014), and Buddhist Pilgrim-Monks as Agents of Cultural and Artistic Transmission: The International Buddhist Art Style in East Asia, ca. 645–770 (2018). Her edited volume, Miraculous Images in Asian Traditions, will be published as volume 50 of the journal Ars Orientalis in late November of 2020.

Jiayi Zhu is a PhD student in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her research interest is medieval Buddhist art and the cultural exchanges among China, Japan and Korea. Currently she is curious about the medium of stone.

Special Workshop Series by Wu Hung

Yifan Zou 2 Comments

Newly Unearthed Tang Tomb Murals of Simulated Shanshui Paintings — What Do They Tell Us?

新出土的“拟山水画”唐墓壁画——它们告诉我们什么？

 

Details of the landscape mural in the tomb of Han Xiu 韩休 (740), photo by Wu Hung.

 

The talk will last about 45 min – 1 hour, with about 1 hour afterwards for Q&A moderated by ZOU Yifan (persons in need of assistance please contact yifanzou@uchicago.edu)

 

Part 1: Oct 30 (Friday), 5 pm – 7 pm (CDT)

Registration link: https://uchicago.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5bt1KsvvSJ-U0TvcmTDekA

Part 2: Nov 5 (Thursday), 5 pm – 7 pm (CST) *please note CDT to CST transition

Registration link for Part 2: https://uchicago.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_W6mEBsRPTDa9utJ9obbtow 

Nancy P. Lin, OCT 21

Minori Egashira Leave a Comment

Speaker: Nancy P. Lin (PhD candidate, Department of Art History)

“Sites at the Periphery: Performance, Photography, and the Making of Beijing’s ‘East Village’” (selection from dissertation chapter)

Discussant: Madeline Eschenburg (Lecturer, College of Arts and Sciences, Washburn University)

Wednesday, October 21st 2020

4:45-6:45 pm, Zoom meeting (please find the registration link below)

 

Abstract:

The development of experimental contemporary Chinese art outside the official support of government institutions in the 1990s has often been described as “underground” (dixia) or “independent” (duli). Yet I suggest that the term “peripheral” (bianyuan) is a much more apt description as it simultaneously refers to the very spaces in which art has flourished in the physical city and the spatial dynamics of experimental art’s alternative positioning. During a period of massive urban reconstruction, artists living and working in the city’s urban fringes struggled with spatial precarity and social/economic marginality. These sites and living conditions also gave rise to new types of artistic projects, spaces, and a distinctly new artistic identity. This paper explores how collaborations between performance and photographic activities by a group of artists living in Beijing’s “East Village” drew upon the area’s spatial marginality to construct an alternative artistic identity and social network that transformed the run-down village into an art world site. These activities in the mid-1990s will be contextualized within the broader phenomenon of site-based art practices that participated in the creation of new social and institutional spaces for contemporary art in China. This period of artistic activities at the periphery serves as a case study for understanding the complex dynamic between artistic practice, social change, and urban transformation.

RongRong, East Village Beijing, 1994 No. 1, 1994, Gelatin silver print, 20 × 24 in (50.8 × 61 cm)

Zoom Registration Link:

https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEocOGqrj8vGNCHHzwRUa0aNvp8sjbjyrKW

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Nancy P. Lin is a PhD candidate specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese art and architecture. She received her B.A. summa cum laude in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation, titled “Making Spaces: Site-based Practice in Contemporary Chinese Art, 1990s-2000s,” focuses on the intersection of art and urbanism in examining locally situated, yet globally oriented spatial and site-specific artistic practices in China. As the 2019-2020 Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Curatorial Intern at the Smart Museum of Art, she worked extensively on the exhibition Allure of Matter: Material Art from China. From 2017 to 2018, she was a fellow of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Urban Art and Urban Form, co-organizing three interdisciplinary symposia that brought together artists, architects, and urban scholars from the sciences and the humanities. 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 independent publication Building Subjects (Standpunkte, 2019), a study on collective housing in China. Her other publications include an article in the edited volume Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interfaces (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) and a forthcoming article in the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Intellect, Winter 2020).

Her work has been generously supported by The Getty Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Schiff Foundation, Graham Foundation, as well as the Art History Department and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago.

 

Madeline Eschenburg is a lecturer at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. She specializes in contemporary Chinese art with a focus on performance and Social Practice art. She has published articles and book chapters about Chinese performance art and its relationship to documentary practice in the 1990s and early 21st century. She is currently working on a book project which explores the history of contemporary Chinese artists’ inclusion of marginalized communities in performance art and Social Practice projects. She will be presenting a paper titled “Mapping Marginality: Chinese Migrant Workers at the Venice Biennial” at the 2021 College Art Association annual conference.

Aurelia Campbell, OCT 7

Yifan Zou Leave a Comment

Aurelia Campbell (Associate Professor, Art, Art History, and Film Faculty, Boston College)

“Tibetan Stupa as Protective Force in Early Ming Burials”

Discussant: Wei-Cheng Lin (Associate Professor of Art History and the College, Department of Art History)

Wednesday, Oct 7

 4:45-6:45 pm, Zoom meeting (please find the registration link below)

 

Abstract

This paper focuses on an unusual early Ming dynasty (1368-1644) brick tomb in Mayishan, Wangcheng County, Hunan. The tomb belongs to a woman named Zhang Miaoshou, who served as the wet nurse of Prince Gu, nineteenth son of the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang. Among the numerous Buddhist artifacts unearthed from the tomb, the most intriguing is a large stone reliquary in the shape of a Tibetan-style stupa, which holds dozens of Buddhist and Daoist scriptures. What was it doing there? By connecting the stupa to a host of earlier material evidence incorporating the written word, this paper argues that the stupa and its contents ultimately served apotropaic and salvific functions. It furthermore makes a case for the significance of the Tibetan-style stupa as a symbol of protection in the post-Mongol world.

Zoom Registration Link:

https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJErc-muqTgpE9BK_PMqYLqqL9mZweUs7VyH

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Aurelia Campbell is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Film at Boston College. Her research centers on the architecture and material culture of the Yuan (1279-1368), Ming (1368-1644), and Qing (1644-1911) periods in China. Campbell’s first book, What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming (University of Washington Press, 2020) examines the construction projects of the famous Yongle emperor to consider how imperial ideology is given form in built space. Addressing how and why his buildings were constructed, the book expands our understanding of “imperial Chinese architecture” as a building typology. Her second book, in progress, explores the relationship between Buddhism and mortuary culture in the Ming and Qing periods. The book will consider Buddhist funerary art and architecture from a large swath of society—including emperors, empresses, princes, eunuchs, monks, and aristocrats—to better understand how conceptions of the afterlife differed according to one’s position in life. The book aims to fill a gap in scholarship on Chinese tombs after the Yuan dynasty. Her research has been supported through grants and fellowships from Millard Meiss Publication Fund, James Geiss Foundation, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Asian Cultural Council, and Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, among others.

 

Wei-Cheng Lin is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Lin specializes in the history of Chinese art and architecture, with a focus on medieval period, and has published on both Buddhist and funeral art and architecture of medieval China. His first book, Building a Sacred Mountain: Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount Wutai, was published in 2014 with the University of Washington Press. He has also written on topics related to traditional architecture in modern China. Lin is currently working on two book projects: Performative Architecture of China, explores architecture’s performative potential through history and the meanings enacted through such architectural performance. Necessarily Incomplete: Fragments of Chinese Artifacts investigate fragments of Chinese artifacts, as well as the cultural practices they solicited and engaged, to locate their agentic power in generating the multivalent significance of those artifacts, otherwise undetectable or overlooked.

AUTUMN 2020 SCHEDULE

Yifan Zou Leave a Comment

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are excited to share our autumn quarter calendar. Due to the University of Chicago’s continuation of remote teaching/learning, we will conduct all sessions virtually for the autumn quarter. Unless otherwise noted, all VMPEA meetings will take place on Wednesdays at 4:45 pm to 6:45 pm (Chicago local time, note there will be a switch from CDT to CST on Nov 1st) via Zoom. The individual meeting link will be sent out along with detailed talk abstract via VMPEA lists one week prior to the talk for registration.

Anonymous, Herd of Deer in a Maple Grove 丹楓呦鹿圖, ink and colors on silk, Five Dynasties Period (907-960), National Palace Museum Taipei.

Oct. 7 (Wed)
Aurelia Campbell (Associate Professor, Art, Art History, and Film Faculty, Boston College)
“The Tibetan Stupa as a Protective Force in Early Ming Burials”
Discussant: Wei-Cheng Lin (Associate Professor of Art History and the College, Department of Art History)

 

Oct. 21 (Wed)
Nancy P. Lin (PhD candidate, Department of Art History)
“Sites at the Periphery: Performance, Photography, and the Making of Beijing’s ‘East Village’”
Discussant: Madeline Eschenburg (Lecturer, College of Arts and Sciences, Washburn University)

 

Nov. 6 (Fri)
Dorothy Wong (Professor, Mcintire Department of Art, University of Virginia)
“Colossal Buddha Images in China, Past and present”
Discussant: Jiayi Zhu (PhD student, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations)
*Note: This talk will take place on Friday from 4:45-6:45 pm (CST)

 

Nov 18 (Wed)
Alan Longino (PhD student, Department of Art History)
“Yutaka Matsuzawa and Looking Around Quantum Art”
Discussant: Orianna Cacchione (Curator of Global Contemporary Art, Smart Museum)

 

Dec 2 (Wed)
Or Porath (Post-Doctoral Researcher, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations)
“Japan’s Forgotten God: Jūzenji in Literature and the Visual Arts”
Discussant: Ian Cipperly (PhD student, Department of History)
*Collaboration with the APEA

 

We look forward to seeing you via Zoom and hope you will share this with all who might also be interested in joining our community. Please direct questions and inquiries to Yifan Zou (yifanzou@uchicago.edu) and Minori Egashira (egashiram@uchicago.edu)
Hope you are staying safe and healthy!

Yifan + Minori
VMPEA Graduate Student Coordinators 2020-21

Maki Kaneko, June 5

yinwu Leave a Comment

Maki Kaneko, PhD., Associate Professor, The Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas

“Inter-Imperial (Bri)Collage”: Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani’s Visualization of Incarceration, Hiroshima and New York City

Discussant: Chelsea Foxwell, PhD., Associate Professor of Art History and the College, Department of Art History

Friday, June 5, 2020

4:30-6:30 pm (CT), Zoom meeting (please find the registration link below)

Abstract: This presentation focuses on the artist Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani (1920-2012) and explores how his collage-drawings pose a challenge to the normative mode of history writing. Mirikitani was born in Sacramento, California, raised in and trained as a painter in Hiroshima, Japan, and returned to the U.S. at age eighteen. During the Pacific War, Mirikitani was incarcerated and forced to renounce his U.S. citizenship. From the late 1980s, Mirikitani, without acknowledgment of his reinstated U.S. citizenship, lived and made his art on the streets of New York City to survive as well as keep his memories alive. Mirikitani’s interstitial identity as a kibei (the Japanese Americans educated in Japan) and long-term stateless person, trans-Pacific trajectories, and street life in NYC largely shaped his signature art form and practice: a mélange of Nihonga (traditionalist-style Japanese painting) and photo-collage made out of cast-off materials. These works were also created through ad-hoc collaborations with the NYC neighbors and pedestrians who provided the artist with necessary tools or labor. Through this highly entangled art form and unconventional working method, the artist made a bold claim about his legitimate position within mainstream US-Japan history as well as the post-1945 NY art community.  Given his improvised method of collaboration and interstitial identity, I propose to analyze Mirikitani’s collaged works through the two critical conceptual lenses of “bricolage” and “inter-imperiality.” This study thereby considers the radical potentials of Mirikitani’s art which invites us to reimagine the histories beyond the rigid fixities of nation-state and identitarian politics.

Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Untitled (Hiroshima), ca. 2001.

Zoom Registration Link: https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50sdO6gqD4jTkGL5pvMOEX3RSVI9Fcepg

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Maki Kaneko is an Associate Professor in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas, where she researches and teaches modern and contemporary Japanese visual arts and the art of Asian Americans and the Asian diaspora. Her publications include the single-authored book Mirroring the Japanese Empire: The Male Figure in Yoga Painting, 1930-1950 (Brill, 2015) and the co-edited volume “Modern & Contemporary East Asian Art,” special issue, Spencer Museum of Art The Register VIII, no. 5 (2019). She also has published the book chapter “Japanese Modern Art History in North America and the Perspective of Asian American Art Studies,” in Taniguchi Fumie Studies (Toyonaka: Ryūshidō, 2018), “War Heroes of Modern Japan: Early 1930s War Fever and the Three Brave Bombers,” in Conflicts of Interest: The Art of War in Modern Japan (St. Louis: St. Louis Art Museum, 2016), and the journal article “New Art Collectives in the Service of the War: The Formation of Art Organizations During the Asia-Pacific War, 1937-1945,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 21, no. 2 (Spring 2013). Kaneko is currently working on a book-length study of and an exhibition on Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani and Japanese and Japanese American artists in the post-9/11 era.

Chelsea Foxwell’s scholarship ranges from the medieval through modern periods of Japanese art with special emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kano Hōgai and the Search for Images (2015). In 2012 she co-curated the exhibition Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints with Anne Leonard at the Smart Museum of Art. Her work focuses on Japan’s artistic interactions with the rest of East Asia and beyond, nihonga and yōga (Japanese oil painting); “export art” and the world’s fairs; practices of image circulation, exhibition, and display; and the relationship between image-making and the kabuki theater. A member of the Committee on Japanese Studies and the Center for the Art of East Asia, she is a contributor to the Digital Scrolling Paintings and the Reading Kuzushiji projects.

 

Zhenru Zhou, May 29

yinwu Leave a Comment

Zhenru Zhou, PhD candidate, Department of Art History

“Hexi Buddhist Landscape in the Making: From a Dunhuang Colossal Buddha Image to the Nine-Story Pavilion”

Discussant: Jiayi Zhu, PhD student, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Friday, May 29, 2020

4:30-6:30 pm, Zoom meeting (please find the registration link below)

Abstract: The colossal Buddha image is one of the major visual elements in the Buddhist landscape across South, Central and East Asia. The Northern Colossal Image (beidaxiang 北大像) of the Mogao Caves (Dunhuang, Gansu), created in 695 CE, is often regarded as such a production of “the Second International Buddhist Style” whose other name is “the Imperial Style of Tang China”. This paper, however, complicates this static view by asking what the Mogao Colossal has visually, physically, and conceptually evolved into since the Tibetan (781-850) and the Guiyijun periods (851-1036). It investigates the ways in which the Mogao Colossal has engaged with the spectacles of Buddhist caves and auspicious images (ruixiang 瑞像) at regional and local scales—namely, along the Hexi or Gansu Corridor, at the Mogao complex, and in the vicinity of the Mogao Colossal. I argue that the Mogao Colossal, as the production of a series of image-making and story-telling, was remade for the purpose of reviving and relocating the legendary Buddhist landscape from the ancient Liangzhou (present-day Wuwei, Gansu) to the contemporary Dunhuang. This study examines a variety of visual materials, ranging from medieval and modern visual representations of Buddhist caves and landscapes, to archaeological evidences at the Mogao Caves and the Tiantishan Caves (Wuwei) that were excavated or published at the turn of the 21st century. By critically and creatively engaging with these materials, this study hopes to shed new light on the coming-into-being of the elaborate architectural traditions of the Mogao Caves, as the Mogao Colossal is now more popularly known as “the Nine-Story Pavilion” (jiuceng lou 九层楼).

The vicinity of the Northern Colossal Image Cave, the Mogao Caves (Dunhuang, China). Various sources, photocollage by author.

Zoom Registration Link:

https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/vpUqd-Gqpj8ilKaC_sf3FR0f5noJHZcNLA

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Zhenru Zhou studies religious art and architecture in China and beyond, with a focus on the medieval Buddhist cave-temples in Northern China. She received an M. Arch degree from Princeton University in 2016, and another M. Arch and a B. Arch degree from Tsinghua University (China). Her dissertation project, titled “Between the Virtual and the Real: A New Architecture of the Mogao Caves (Dunhuang, China) in 781-1036 CE,” explores the complexity of cave architecture regarding its hybrid materiality and visuality, construction and reconstruction over time.

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.

 

Boyoung Chang, May 22

yinwu Leave a Comment

Boyoung Chang, PhD., Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Art History

“Reconstructing the Nation: contemporary Korean photography since the 1990s”

Discussant: Tingting Xu, PhD candidate, Department of Art History

Friday, May 22, 2020

4:30-6:30 pm, Zoom meeting (please find the registration link below)

Abstract: This presentation discusses the photography of South Korean photographers, focusing on the medium’s relationship with the political and societal changes in and around the country that started in the late 1980s. Focusing on art photography that took various formats from documentary to the performative, encompassing the staged, portraits, and snapshots, it addresses the development of a medium that is intertwined with the transformation of Korean society. Represented with democratization and globalization, South Korea reorganized its political system and opened its doors to the world in this era. I argue that the transformation of contemporary Korean art photography is not only a reflection of this essential reconstruction of the nation’s identity but that of the medium itself, with its performative nature, mediating the process. The exploration starts from the early practices of the mid-20th century Korean photography and moves on to the thematic discussions of how contemporary photography addressed the key issues that mark the transition. When the long history of military dictatorship ended and democracy arrived in Korea, the nation reestablished its identity by declaring a break from the past, refashioning its history, and building new relationships with other countries, including North Korea. This research argues that the history of Korean photography parallels these shifts. Unlike the photographers of the past, contemporary photographers, with newly obtained freedom and various photographic languages, revisited the repressed history, reinterpreted official history, and deconstructed it according to the changed socio-political climate. As the state-led globalization transformed Korean identity into the international context, Korean photography too went through the process of challenging the preexisting notions and striving to position itself in global photography. Fully incorporating the social, political, and cultural history of Korea and the surrounding international contexts, this research takes an interdisciplinary approach in articulating the history of the nation’s photography. With an emphasis on a need to contextualize artistic practices into its society, it improves the understanding of contemporary Korea and its photographic practices.

Suntag Noh, Forgetting machines, 2005-2011

 

Zoom Registration Link: https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIrcOqtrj0jq6en_pocBCWxbUtdUN6KzA

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Boyoung Chang is a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for the Art of East Asia in the  Department of Art History. She specializes in contemporary Korean photography with a particular interest in how the history of Korean photography intertwines with the nation’s dynamic modern and contemporary history. Chang earned her doctorate at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her dissertation, “Reconstructing the Nation: Contemporary Korean Photography since the 1990s,” that she discusses today focused on how Korean art photography developed in parallel with the transformation of South Korea since the late 1980s. Her teaching and research interests also include the aftermath of World War II, the impact of the Cold War, globalization, and cultural identity seen through contemporary Asian art and photography.

Tingting Xu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the history of photography in China, and the intercultural and intermedial practices of Chinese artists in early modern and modern periods.  Her first Chinese book, Niche: In or Out – Interviews and Perspectives on Contemporary North American Photographic Artists, written when she was a MFA student at the Parsons School of Design, won two author’s prizes in China. She works as an assistant curator at the Peabody Essex Museum in 2018, helping organizing a coming major exhibition on nineteenth-century photographs of China. She is a recipient of The Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (2018-2019), and the Joan and Stanford Alexander Award of the Houston Museum.

 

Sun, Bo. May 8

yinwu Leave a Comment

Sun, Bo. PhD., Visiting Scholar, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University; Associate Research Professor and Director of Science and Art Office, Exhibition Department in the National Museum of China

“A Complimentary Study of shuilu-hua (the Painting of Water-and-Land Rituals) in Qinglong Temple (Temple of Blue Dragon) in Jishan County (Shanxi, China) (稷山青龙寺水陆画考补)”

Discussant: Tao, Jin. Master’s student, Divinity School

This talk will be delivered in Chinese.

Friday, May 8, 2020

4:30-6:30 pm, Zoom meeting (please find the registration link below)

Abstract: The “Water-and-Land Ritual” (shuilu fahui水陆法会) was one of the most elaborated Buddhist rites developed in China for the universal salvation of the deceased and all sentient beings. The “Water-and-Land Painting” (shuilu hua 水陆画), which is an indispensable visual aid to this ritual, was often painted in Buddha halls or on hanging scrolls. It is one of the major subject matters of Chinese Buddhist painting since the Middle Periods. Among the numerous Water-and-Land Paintings that exist in China, the earliest example is a mural circle in the Middle Buddha Hall of the Qinglong Monastery (the Monastery of Blue Dragon), which was painted during the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368). The Qinglong mural preserves many early features of the Water-and-Land Painting, such as a special and rigorous composition. The Qinglong mural, which differs from later paintings of the Ming (1368–1644) and the Qing periods (1644–1911), deserves a comprehensive case study. Since the publication of the author’s Master’s Thesis titled “A Study of The Mural Paintings in The Qinglong Monastery in Jishan County — With a Focus on The Water-and-Land Painting in The Middle Hall” (稷山青龙寺壁画研究——以腰殿水陆画为中心) in 2010, several North American scholars have conducted new researches based on the author’s primary study. In the past decade, gladly, new evidences have been found. These evidences not only approve some of the author’s theses, but also allow him to elucidate some painting details that initially appeared obscure. In these seemingly trivial details, the author finds a new approach to the meanings and the historical developments of the Water-and-Land Painting. In this talk, he will discuss five of the important details that shed light on the Qinglong mural and the genre of the Water-and-Land Painting.

A detail of the Water and Land mural painting, southern wall, the Middle Buddha Hall of the Qinglong Monastery, Yuan dynasty.

 

You can download Sun Bo’s pre-circulated materials here with the password shuilu.

Zoom Registration Link: https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/uZQsdOugrDsqfA9q4LSbPDDo1bcEpTNIrA

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dr. Sun, Bo is an Associate Research Professor and Director of Science and Art Office, Exhibition Department in National Museum of China. Since 2010, he has participated in curating a series of exhibitions hosted by the National Museum of China ranging from ancient archaeology to contemporary art. In terms of research, his academic interests focus on Chinese religious art after the tenth century, and material and visual culture exchange in Eurasia. As a visiting scholar of CAMLab, he currently engages in three research or exhibition projects including paintings used for shuilu rites (水陸法會), and visual representation of Avatamsaka Sutra and Chan’an of Tang dynasty.

Tao, Jin is a 2nd year MA student at the Divinity School University of Chicago, and also a practicing architect based in Beijing. Jin’s previous architectural projects mainly attribute to religious typology, especially a few Taoist temples in the sacred mountain in the south of China. His research interests cover the comparative study between Jewish and Taoist theology, ritual practice of ancient Chinese religions, and the sacred space generated by the body concepts, ritual actions, religious thoughts, and social structures. His current book in progress is The Covenant: The Religious Ethos and Conferral Liturgy of Taoist Register.