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AAS Annual Conference 2014

AAS Annual Conference, March 27-30, Philadelphia, PA

 

Panel 231. Shooting, Building, Dwelling: Urban Space and Contemporary Visual Culture in China. Xavier Ortells-Nicolau, Autonomous University of Barcelona

Roaming through Rubble: Aesthetic Experimentalism in Photographs of the Demolition Site *Xavier Ortells-Nicolau (Autonomous University of Barcelona)

While demolition is commonplace in projects of urban development and renewal around the world, the conditions of China's legal system and real state market have extended the living span of urban wastelands and architectural debris. Visual anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki is on the mark when he writes: “no matter where one turns in the People’s Republic, one beholds a sight—and site—of rapid change.”

A number of filmmakers and visual artists are confronting the demolition site to address their social and historical milieu. With their highly subjective take on the demolition site, these artists offer an alternative to State-led processes of symbolic ruinification, and the commodification of history and identity of the booming tourist sector.

Combining an urban studies contextual approach with a close reading of visual examples, this presentation outlines significant projects of experimental visual artists like Wang Qingsong, Chen Qiulin, and Sun Yanchu. Their projects, epitomizing the most experimental (shiyan) aspect of contemporary visual practice, provide a first-hand testimony to an experience of sensory estrangement, while testing the limits of their media and language. This paper focuses on the aesthetics of fragmentation and shock catalyzed by the intensified materiality of rubble, as well as the performative resources activated by a fruitless search for vanished human traces.

 

Abandoned Negatives and Themeless Parks: Ways of Seeing Contemporary China in Two Photographic Projects *Lu Pan (University of Hong Kong)

This presentation juxtaposes two photographic projects to illustrate ways of perceiving everyday space in contemporary China: on the one hand, “Silvermine Project” (2009-2013), by Beijing-based French collector and editor Thomas Sauvin, recycles a vast collection of abandoned film negatives from the 1980s to the early 2000s, and subsequently “curates” these amateur images into the frame of a quasi-ethnographic approach. On the other hand, Hong Kong photographer Dustin Shum’s “Themeless Parks” (2008) presents a series images of public parks in Chinese cities and towns.

The two projects propose different readings of the “postsocialist” condition in contemporary China. While the domestic shots curated by Sauvin actively mobilize individual and national identities in private and public spaces, turning photo-taking into a postsocialist ritual, Shum’s compositions of shape, color and architectural density, reveal a highly orchestrated “China” that evokes an historical rupture, and preempts the emergence of an individual identity.

This paper analyzes the textual articulations of individuality, space, and temporality present in the two projects. Furthermore, it contextualizes the subjectivity of the photographers/curators as “outsiders,” both in relation to contemporary notions of identity in China, as well as in the context of a transnational circulation of images.

Panel 102. Photographic Encounters in Republican China and Colonial India: The Work of Zhuang Xueben Seen through a Transnational Lens, 1934-1945. Yajun Mo, Long Island University, C.W. Post

Having vanished from the public eye for almost a half-century, the work of Zhuang Xueben (1909-1984), a pioneer in Chinese ethnographic photography, has been rediscovered in the twenty-first century. A self-educated documentary photographer, Zhuang traveled throughout the Sino-Tibetan frontier regions in the mid-to-late 1930s and across the border to India in the early 1940s, during which he took thousands of pictures of the culturally diverse peoples he encountered. Contemporary Chinese photography critics have referred to him as “China’s Edward Curtis.” However, these critics have largely glossed over the complex transregional and transnational networks and activities that facilitated Zhuang’s documentary production. Nor have they paid sufficient attention to the detailed ethnographic data chronicled in his pictures. This panel reexamines Zhuang’s career and images from a cross-border perspective, developing three themes. First, placing Zhuang’s career against a backdrop of the nation-building processes in China and the changing regional order in trans-Himalayas, we demonstrate that, unlike their predecessors in the Qing period, Han intellectuals from Republican urban centers viewed western frontiers as an integral part of the Chinese nation and a crucial place to define the contours of China’s geo-political body in Asia. Second, we explore how Zhuang’s photographs in China and India manifest the influence of, and the rebellion against, colonial habits of the Western colonizing powers and Japan. Finally, examining ethnic formations and national representations through Zhuang’s works, we explore how photographs can be used as both archive and counter-archive in anthropological and historical studies.

 

“Journey to the West”: Internal Orientalism, Nation-Building, and the Photographic Frontier in Republican China *Yajun Mo (Long Island University)

In March 1936, Shanghai’s Liangyou huabao, the leading mass-circulation pictorial in China at the time, debuted a new travel column titled “Journey to the West.” Unlike other travel columns in Liangyou, it does not feature major tourist attractions in coastal China or showcase exotic foreign destinations. Instead, it serializes photographs of China’s western frontiers and the non-Han ethnic groups residing in the area. Taken by Shanghai photographer Zhuang Xueben, these photographs featured in Liangyou provided a striking visual experience for Han Chinese readers in urban centers. Examining the specific cultural contexts and visual contents of Zhuang’s travel column, this paper explores the process through which Han Chinese visual intellectuals codified non-Han ethnic peoples as their internal Other. Although the ethnic minorities in these images were often portrayed as distant, exotic, and inferior, Zhuang Xueben also presented them in a positive light while identifying different ethnic groups as elements within the Chinese nation. How do we make sense of these seemingly paradoxical representations? Can we view Zhuang Xueben’s column as a product of internal Orientalism in Republican China? Or should we understand it as an effort to strengthen China’s internal cohesion in response to the ongoing effects of Western and Japanese imperialism? Through an analysis of Zhuang’s photographic accounts in Liangyou, this paper demonstrates how the operation of internal Orientalism and the agenda of nation-building were intrinsically linked in China in the 1930s.

 

Temples, Tribals and Sino-Indian Trade: Pan-Asian Nationalisms and the Everyday in Zhuang Xueben’s Photographs of India *Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa (University of Toronto Scarborough)

Zhuang Xueben was a pioneer in the fields of ethnic photography and anthropology in China, and his work has much to contribute to the construction of the ethnic “Other” in Republican period history. His engagement with cultural Others extended beyond China’s frontiers, however, as an important chapter in his career saw his camera turn to focus on Indian subjects. Zhuang spent several years in the 1940s working as a trade agent in British India, between the commercial centers of Calcutta and Darjeeling. This paper will focus on his photography from these years, which serves as a crucial record of Chinese perceptions of India during the sunset of British Empire. Zhuang’s photographs act as a rare window into everyday life in India presented by a Chinese intellectual during the 1940s, Sino-Indian trade relations, and, most crucially, inter-Asian engagement at a time of rapid change. His camera captured local cultures with his usual precision and, with his focus on cultural heritage sites, suggests an inter-Asian form of Orientalism. More significantly, his photographic work from his Indian years presents an archive of local interactions between Indian independence activists and businessmen and Chinese traders and intellectuals. A close reading of Zhuang’s photographs from the period suggests a dynamic intellectual space that facilitated a pan-Asian imagining of a world without European imperialism, thereby contributing to China’s nation-building process from beyond China’s borders while engaging with, and taking inspiration from, other Asian nationalisms.

 

Ethnicity, Autonomy, and Creolization: Zhuang Xueben’s Images of the Tu (Monguor) as Counter-Archive *Gerald Roche (Uppsala University)

When Zhuang Xueben, a Shanghai-based photographer, visited northwest China’s Qinghai Province in the late 1930s, he took photographs of the Tu (Monguor) people, one of several small indigenous populations on the Tibetan Plateau. Zhuang took pictures in two distinct Monguor territories: Duluun Lunkuang “Seven Valleys” and Sanchuan “Three Valleys.” Zhuang’s materials, as presented in the recent compilation by Li, Wang, and Zhuang, conflate these two populations under the ethnic rubric “Tu,” thus assuming a homogenous culture for both populations. Western scholarship of the same period similarly conflates these two populations, as does the contemporary state’s ethnic classification project. A close reading of Zhuang's images, however, reveals a far more complex reality. In this paper, I use the concepts of ethnicity, autonomy, and creolization to tease apart the cultural and historical complexities revealed in Zhuang's images. Creolization, here, refers to the cultural similarity resulting from prolonged contact between two or more originally divergent populations. Autonomy refers to distinctiveness resulting from self-determination in cultural production. Ethnicity, finally, refers to cultural similarity that results primarily from shared historical experiences of a population. Recourse to these three concepts allows for a more nuanced reading of Zhuang’s images of the Monguor, and also increases our understanding of the processes that patterned cultural difference on the pre-modern Tibetan Plateau. This reading of Zhuang’s images also allows us to situate them as a counter-archive: a rich data source that confounds the contemporary state’s ethnic classification project.

 

Panel 348. Cultural Representations of 'Fukushima' in Literature, Popular Culture and the Arts. Barbara Geilhorn, Freie Universität Berlin

Photography and Catastrophe: Enigmas of the Image after 3.11 *Marilyn Ivy (Columbia University)

After the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and ensuing nuclear catastrophe in March 2011, artists of various fields felt a need to react to the traumatic events through their work. The number of art works engaging in the discourse on 3.11 has been rapidly increasing over the past three years. Analyzing cultural representations of the triple disaster in Japanese literature, theater, popular culture and the arts, the panel will tackle questions such as: How can art address the calamity in a meaningful way and/or provide solace to the people living in the affected areas? Which role do creative arts and literature play as media of mourning and trauma processing? Are there privileged forms of representation? Research has shown that a documentary approach is often perceived as particularly helpful in coming to terms with trauma. We will also investigate how images of Tohoku (Northeast Japan) have been reshaped after the disaster and to what end. Scrutinizing various media narratives and taking account national as well as local perspectives, the panel aims to comparatively analyze patterns of disaster representation in literature, performing and visual arts as well as popular culture.