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Frontiers of East Asian Art: Chinese, Japanese and European Encounters, 18th-20th Century

  Date: November 18, 2013, 3 - 5 pm
Venue: Room 311, 3rd Floor, Institute of East Asian Art History
Seminarstr. 4, Heidelberg University

 

2013 1113 Frontiers
 

Prof. Tamaki Maeda, Visiting Professor, Heidelberg University

Is Post National Art History Possible? From the Wu Liang Shrine to Hirafuku Hyakusui

The early twentieth century witnessed a rapid influx of Chinese objects in Japan and Europe. What are the effects of this international circulation? This paper will provides insights into “East Asian art” — a concept shared by Japanese and Chinese intellectuals in cultural encounters between Asia and Europe. [more ...]

 

Prof. Wang Cheng-hua, Associate Research Fellow, Academia Sinica and Heinz Götze Visiting Professor of Chinese Art History, Heidelberg University

Customs and Costumes, Males and Females: Representing Peoples and Places at the Court of the Qianlong Emperor (r.1736-95)

This research explores the politics of representation at the Qianlong court. The focus is on the new representational mode that the court appropriated from European precedents to depict peoples and places submitting to the Qing regime. [more ...]

 

Prof. Sarah E. Fraser, Institute of East Asian Art History, Heidelberg University

Out of the Cave: War, Archaeology, and Sino-Modernity

In this paper I argue that Buddhist monuments located in the inner frontier –– easily accessible for artists and intellectuals given their relative proximity to the wartime capital of Chongqing –– became critical spaces for determining the direction of Modern Chinese art during the Sino-Japanese war. [more ...]

 

Lectures

Prof. Tamaki Maeda, Visiting Professor, Heidelberg University

Is Post National Art History Possible? From the Wu Liang Shrine to Hirafuku Hyakusui

If China’s learning from Japan is a new area of study, Japan’s learning from China is still a large lacuna in the history of art in modern times. Among the countless number of objects imported from China to Japan after the 1911 Revolution were works represented the antiquities that predated the Tang-dynasty period. A rubbing of walls of the Wu Liang Shrine (ca. 147-151 CE), for example, inspired Hirafuku Hyakusui (1877-1933) to produce the monumental scale painting Yu Rang (1917). Depicting a famous assassin from Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian, ca. 100 BCE), Hyakusui’s work won the first prize in Bunten, Japan’s most prestigious competitive exhibition of the time. Yu Rang exemplifies the tangible impact on the Japanese art world of jinshixue (literally “study of metal and stone”) — an antiquarian pursuit that permeated the learned-elite of late Qing-early Republican China. Yu Rang also provides insights into “East Asian art” –- a concept shared by Japanese and Chinese intellectuals in cultural encounters between Asia and Europe in the early twentieth century.

 

Prof. Wang Cheng-hua, Associate Research Fellow, Academia Sinica and Heinz Götze Visiting Professor of Chinese Art History, Heidelberg University

Customs and Costumes, Males and Females: Representing Peoples and Places at the Court of the Qianlong Emperor (r.1736-95)

This research will investigate the images that depicted regional peoples, places, practices, and productions made at the court of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795). Of all the images, this research will focus on the set of paintings entitled Tributaries (Zhigongtu 職貢圖), which included multiple handscrolls in different museums. This set of images has attracted much scholarly attention. Based on previous studies, this research will explore further the art-historical and historical meanings revealed by the paintings’ style and the pictorial enterprise that aimed at producing this set of systematic images of the minority and alien peoples known to the Qing government.

The title Zhigong had a long history in Chinese art by the Qing dynasty. Traditionally, the schema of the zhigong images contained individual envoys in a horizontal row facing right, with the variations in the appearances of tribute gifts and the emperor who received the envoys. In comparison, the Qianlong court zhigong images did not depict the envoys directly, but represented each specific people and place with a couple consisting of a man and woman, and the social custom embodied in their costume and the objects accompanying them. This change transformed zhigong images into fengsu images — representations of the imperially and territorially defined places through the depiction of local custom — that belonged to the jurisdiction of the court.

 

Prof. Sarah E. Fraser, Institute of East Asian Art History, Heidelberg University

Out of the Cave: War, Archaeology, and Sino Modernity

My talk examines the problem of primitive cosmopolitanism during 1937-1945 when the Republican government, artists and intellectuals moved the capital in exodus to the interior during the Sino-Japanese war.  In close proximity to the ethnic minorities away from the coast, researchers and artists theorized the problem of the modern Han Chinese identity through their proximity to Tibetan, Miao, Qiang and Yi groups in the mountainous interior.  A Shanghai-based, coastal modernity (inflected with treaty port art and culture) was dismantled as researchers speculated that primitive forms of Chinese culture were still preserved in the interior away from modern European, American, and Japanese (corrupting) cultural forces.  Copying projects at Buddhist monuments were an exercise in uncovering and restoring artistic styles that had value for a Sino-centric modernity. I will also consider how, in the process of transporting the collections of the Palace Museum, archaeological institutes, provincial libraries, and other objects of high cultural value to the safety of the interior, a provisional canon of Chinese art developed during this formative period.

Verantwortlich: SH
Letzte Änderung: 13.11.2013
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