AAS Annual Conference, Chicago, Il, March 26-29, 2015

Pictorialism As Orientalism: Fukuhara Shinzo’s "Beautiful West Lake"
Karen Fraser, Santa Clara University

In 1931, the Japanese photographer Fukuhara Shinzō published a limited-edition volume of images of West Lake in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, titled Beautiful West Lake (Seiko Fukei). Fukuhara, well established as a leading figure in the Japanese photography world, was just one in the long line of artists to take up the subject. Renowned for its scenic beauty, West Lake had been a rich source of artistic and literary inspiration for more than a millennium: its appeal extended beyond China to Japan from at least the fifteenth century, with artists such as Sesshu and Ike no Taiga depicting the theme.

Beautiful West Lake featured two-dozen black and white scenic views, many employing the moody soft focus for which Fukuhara was known. However, the volume included no captions or text whatsoever, leaving viewers with an ambiguous sense of the project’s ultimate intentions. What were Fukuhara’s motivations for choosing this subject and publishing the volume, and how would his intended audience have perceived it? This paper investigates the specific locations and artistic style of Fukuhara’s views, comparing them to the celebrated “Ten Scenes of West Lake” and other historical representations in Chinese and Japanese visual culture and examining them within the context of Fukuhara’s prolific writings on artistic photography. By excavating the significance and meaning of this iconic Chinese site to the artist and the broader Japanese photography world of the 1930s, I analyze how and why this work functioned to convey a romanticized interpretation of an exotic China.

First Trip, First Encounters: Japanese Representations of the Forbidden City (1901)
Vimalin Rujivacharakul, University of Delaware

This paper focuses on two sets of images produced during the same series of events in June 1901. At the time Japanese photographers and architects took advantage of the Qing court’s exile to trespass upon the Forbidden City. The uninvited visitors combed through the complex and photographed nearly every corner, eventually producing a two-volume portfolio published under the auspices of the Imperial Museum of Tokyo. As the first comprehensive collection of Forbidden City photographs ever available, the volumes received immediate acclaim both in Japan and abroad.
What is less known to the public is that there is another set of images produced by the same group of researchers: the hand-drawn illustrations rendered solely for personal remembrance of the first visit to China. The difference between public photographs and personal portrayals was enormous, for through the individual depictions, the Qing regal complex no longer conveyed enduring imperial grandeur, but was instead a group of crumbling edifices.
Intrigued by the stark contrast between these two sets of images, I propose in this paper to utilize visual evidence as the means to bring out late Meiji polemical views about China. During the crucial moment when China’s fate was still undecided and its capital was occupied by foreigners, visual disparity between public and personal renditions of the Forbidden City vividly captured the Japanese ambivalence: would China remain the locale of their historical precedents or was it merely a dying land full of relics from the past?

Panel – Traveling Image/Text: Photographical Culture in Modern China
Chair – Julia Andrews, Ohio State University

Integrating visual, historical and literary studies with critical attention to the relationship of photography to text, this panel offers four rich case studies that explore key issues confronting Chinese photographical culture in the first half of the twentieth century. It treats travel in its literal and metaphorical senses as complex literary, visual, and cultural practices, striking across national, temporal and generic boundaries. The arrival of photography in China brought new opportunities as well as conflicts with the time honored poetic form. Judge and Wu analyze the interaction of photos and accompanying poems or texts, delving into the productive dialogues between photography with its promise of objectivity and traditional lyric aestheticism. Both Yu-jen Liu and Mia Liu chart the circuitous path of the transmission of photos to address how the concept of “Chinese art” and Chinese landscapes were constructed and received in the global flow of images when China served as a locale of departure and arrival. The panel investigates the role that verbal discourse played in visual culture as a framing or abstracting device, and how images were embedded and inflected within literary culture and meaning production. Fraught encounters across borders and the proliferation of images in the modern era, eventually led to new forms of representation and artistic creativity. Enacted in the specific socio-historical contexts in modern China, the dynamics of word/image (whether unified or contested) contributed to configuring new spaces and communication amidst an emerging mass print culture and global consumer market.

Ancient Ruins, Poetic Loss, and the Limits of Photographic Remediation: Zhang Mojun's Hymn to the Ancient Northwest
Joan Judge, York University

Zhang Mojun’s (1884-1965), Xichui yinhen (Hymn to the ancient Northwest), is an intermedial engagement with the ancient past through photographs, narrative, calligraphy, and poetry. Layers of pathos and impending catastrophe—both national and personal—haunt the album. Published in 1935, it documents a Guomindang initiative to deepen national spirituality and heighten national commitment by ritually reconnecting the beleaguered present with a glorious past. Xichiu yinhen is more than an impersonal record of this initiative which centered on a public memorial service held at the tomb of the Yellow Emperor in April 1935, however. A hybrid private/public text, it is a personal meditation on the need to instill a sense of nationalism by reinstating ancient ritual and valorizing poetic practice.
The paper introduces Zhang Mojun—a prominent writer and educator, an erstwhile revolutionary, and a rising figure in the Guomindang party—and explores the political circumstances that led to the creation of her rare and, as yet, unstudied album. It focuses on the contrasting place of photography and poetry in Xichui yinhen, in Zhang’s related writings, and in her reflections on gender. While the introduction of photography changed the ecology of representation in the album and offered a new means of experiencing history, Zhang used this visual medium unreflexively and uncritically. In contrast, she purposefully and forcefully emphasizes the importance of poetry as the crucial link between the present and the ancient past, and between women and China’s national salvation. Vestiges of the past could be mechanically captured by the camera but not spiritually reclaimed.

Visual and Lyrical Selves: Autobiographical Moments in Photo Inscriptions in Modern China
Shengqing Wu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

This paper offers a study of poems written by intellectuals or urbanites on portrait photos of themselves (including cross-dressed, costume and double-self portraits) in the late Qing and Republican eras. The critical questions that it will address include: how did photographic portraits mediate the poets’ connections with interior selves; how did the old poetic forms negotiate with a new medium so as to accommodate the “realistic” vogue; and when Chinese poets confronted these photographs, how did they understand the objectified self, past self, or gendered self. Surveying a range of popular magazines and poetry anthologies, it offers close readings of poems by prominent intellectuals such as Lu Xun, Tan Sitong, Yan Fu, Shen Zengzhi and Qiu Jin in the context of composition, as well as little known poems by middle school students. While writers constantly resorted to old expressions and ideas (Buddhist concepts of truth and illusion in particular) to understand modern self-images, these inscribed autobiographical moments also signify subtle perceptual changes and new self-awareness. Further, by charting the route of the exchange and circulation of photos with accompanying poems, this paper critically analyzes the evocation and transmission of emotions involved in networking and communal life as enacted by the propagation of images and texts. Fundamental conceptual issues and cultural practices were brought into play at this very moment of writing poems about portrait photographs and their subsequent circulation, accounting for a rich visual experience with regard to the self/other in early twentieth-century China.

Stealing Words, Transplanting Photos: Verbal and Visual Articulation of ‘Chinese Art’ in Early Twentieth-Century China
Yu-jen Liu, National Palace Museum

To celebrate its third anniversary, the Journal of National Essence published in 1908 a number of photographic images of Chinese artefacts which included objects housed in overseas collections. Some of these objects were even captioned as ‘Chinese art object’ (Zhongguo meishupin). Although national art works were constantly reproduced in the journal for their presumed power to inspire patriotism, those in foreign collections had never been featured before. Since the journal was known as the prime advocate for the preservation of ‘our’ national essence, the adjective ‘Chinese’, which qualified the referred objects in national terms as different from others and unique to China, seems awkwardly redundant. Interestingly, the images captioned in this way could all be found in Stephen W. Bushell’s Chinese Art, a study published by the Victoria and Albert museum in London in 1904-6. In other words, long before Bushell’s book was published in a complete Chinese translation in 1923, some of its illustrations had already found their way to China. This paper situates these travelling images in the cultural and institutional space where attempts in Europe and China at creating the category of ‘Chinese art’ converged. It explores the different roles text and image played in articulating this newly-emergent museum category in Europe and in its subsequent transmission to China. By examining the intertextual and intervisual relationship of Bushell’s book, this paper reveals how repetition in text and image mattered in both Europe and China in the early twentieth century in culturally distinctive constructions of ‘Chinese art’.

Phantasmagoria and Fragments: Lang Jingshan and His Composite Photography
Mia Yinxing Liu, Bates College

Lang Jingshan (1892-1995, a.k.a. Long Chin-San) has often been identified with his composite photography (jijin sheying), a combination printing practice following aesthetic conventions from traditional Chinese painting, a practice that he started in Shanghai in the 1930s and continued until the end of his long and productive life. His contribution to Chinese photography, although formidable, is not without controversy. Detractors tend to criticize his works as formulaic in style, conservative in taste, lacking innovation or originality, and divorced from social reality. Others suspect that Lang’s fantasy landscapes composed in the darkroom harbor tendencies of self-orientalization, especially given the artist’s active presence in international salon circles. I will examine the writings, inscriptions, and catalogue entries or captions, both written by Lang himself and by the Chinese and international salon organizers, gallery owners, curators, and publishers. I will also locate his works in both a national and an intercultural context: where and when they were made, exhibited, and published, and what the agents and sources were. I hope to trace his phantasmagoric images back to the fragments he used, and reconstruct a picture of his career and the history of Chinese pictorialist photography. While his jijin landscape may intend to mask the edges of fragments, I will highlight the hidden political and personal anxiety in his works, and the incompleteness or the slippage of both the hyperbolic praise of his achievements and the severe censure of his conservatism both politically and aesthetically.

‘Arrested Civilization’: John Thomson and His Travel Photography, 1873-1874
Li-Lin Tseng, Pittsburg State University

My paper examines critical issues pertaining to cross-cultural documentations, translations, and interpretations through a new case study of a Scottish photographer, John Thomson (1837-1921). He was a lifelong member of the prestigious Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and the Ethnographical Society of London. Thomson travelled throughout imperial China in 1868-1872, shortly after the second Opium War. With his camera, he encapsulated faces of local peoples, places, and customs he encountered. Returning to Europe, Thomson soon transformed his cross-cultural experiences (translated and interpreted into visual images and written texts) into various publications, the popularity of which occupied special cultural spaces that were savored by the Victorian audiences of the Britain. His four-volume work, Illustrations of China and Its People (1873), accompanied with 200 pictures and rich descriptions of the land, created the prototype of his writings about the Empire. The New York Times in 1898 characterized Thomson’s picturing of the mid-19th century China as “arrested civilization.” The phrase denotes a timeless, unchanging society, corresponding to Thomson’s claim that for the past two thousand years China had remained frozen in time. Thomson’s canonical work awarded him a position of lecturer at RGS, advising its members how to document their journeys overseas. His photographs later became textbook subjects, archival materials, and museum collections. Without a doubt, Thomson’s portrayal of “arrested civilization” produces a specific knowledge of race, gender, and class of the cultural other, the authority of which demands a reassessment of the construction of the history, the memory, and the culture of China.

Documenting History, Crafting Nation: Photographs by Sunil Janah (1918-2012)
Ranu Roychoudhuri, University of Chicago

Beginning in the 1940s and operative through the 1950s, the process of decolonization not only posed a socio-economic challenge for South Asia but also created aesthetic predicaments for visual artists. To elaborate these predicaments, this paper will focus on documentary photography of Sunil Janah (1918-2012). I will juxtapose Janah’s works during the Bengal Famine (1943) and his portrayal of emerging Indian heavy industries (1950s) to analyse two historically distinct, yet structurally similar moments of imagining the nation during India’s passage from the colonial to the post colonial. Reflecting on these images, Janah mentioned that he was visually responding to history, while also feeling responsible towards his photographic subjects. Janah wanted to salvage his subjects by making his viewer sensitive to the situations that structured his photographs.

I read Janah’s photographs “as a space of political relations,” (Azoulay 2012) that demands ethical engagement with the visuals. This space allows us to imagine photographs of subjects and citizens in ways beyond the dominant discourses, which often designate a secondary status to viewers. I argue, Janah’s aesthetics of addressing audience made possible a critical interrogation of the historical moments he was documenting. While making the famine victims “visible,” Janah was inviting his audience on behalf of the colonized British Indian subjects, who were forgotten for the sake of the World War II. Likewise many of Janah’s industrial photographs were to prompt viewers to question the Nehruvian vision of industrial development, which often sacrificed social welfare in the name of “greater common good.”

Of Other Landscapes: Contested Environments in Representation
Symposium and Exhibition, Denison University, November 13-14, 2014

Gated Precarity: A Post-Socialist Forbidden City in Global China
Tong Lam, Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto

Xiancun, a semi-demolished urban slum in central Guangzhou fenced by ameliorative propaganda hoardings, conjures up a different imagery of the gated community. It is however an eyesore to Chinese authorities and urban planners, and home to many migrant workers subjugated to precarious living conditions. This talk analyzes the symbolic significance of Xiancun in China’s recent history and in the wider global context. It also reflects on the challenge of creating visual images of urban ruins and slums in a world that is increasingly dominated by spectacle.

The Sinification of Nihilism?
Jason McGrath, Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Minnesota

This talk addresses, on the one hand, the nihilism intrinsic to capitalism as described by Marshall Berman in his reading of Marx and Engels, and relates it to Tong Lam's images of China under the current development boom. On the other, it will address a quite different "nihilism" implied by ecocritical thought on the "late anthropocene”.

Redefining the Local Lifeworld: Documentary Filmmaking and Political Empowerment in Hong Kong’s Inner City
Chunchun Ting, Doctoral Candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

This talk examines the changing meanings of inner-city neighborhoods in post-handover Hong Kong. The social perceptions of these neighborhoods reveal society’s attitude toward redevelopment, the collective past, the urban poor, and Hong Kong itself as a city and a community. Focusing on an art/activist group that collaborates with evictees, I observe a gradual shift in the discourse of urban preservation from cultural heritage to housing rights and the communal ownership of neighborhoods.

The Shared Landscapes of Asia: How an Exhibition Found Space for Japan's War Memories
Julia Adeney Thomas, Associate Professor Department of History, University of Notre Dame; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard, 2014-15

This talk contrasts two exhibitions, both at the Yokohama Museum of Art, one in 1995 and the other in 2004.  In the first exhibition, “Photography in the 1940s,” Japanese aggression was occluded; in the second, through a mixed-media display of landscapes, inventive curators found another point of view that could reveal atrocity while creating space for mutual understanding. The seemingly most benign of art genres was brought to bear on a violent, troubled past, and proved capable of providing a better line of sight.

On the Freedom of Ruins
Catherine Stuer, Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Culture, Denison University

This talk explores how the figure of the ruin, so-called master-trope of modern reflexivity, shares structural affinities with the past trace in imperial China. Both medium for nostalgic fetishization of the past and for symbolic contestation of the present, I compare both figures to investigate the historical concurrence and aftereffects of Euro-American and traditional Chinese modalities of ruin-representation. I focus here on photographic landscapes produced by early 20th century colonial explorers and local critics of urban destruction in China.

Symposium: Photography and the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, May 22-23, 2015

Collectable Artifacts: Beijing, the Former Capital, of the 1930s in Photographs
Wei-Cheng Lin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Published in 1935, Jiudu wenwu lue 舊都文物略, or Compendium of Cultural Relics in the Former Capital, was the first official undertaking in modern China to document historical remains of Beijing, the perennial political and cultural center until 1928, when Nanjing was designated the new capital of the Republic of China. As its text is composed in classical language that frames the documentation of the historical city in a definite erudite feel, the Compendium nevertheless illustrates not so much an old as a renewed former capital with over 400 photographs. Described in the book as “true views” (zhenjing 真景), these photographs, I will argue, were meant to capture the renovated old Beijing, while disenchanting its symbolic ambience. The former capital, or jiudu 舊都, as such was a visually invented and constructed reality, providing a cohesive representation of the cultural past for the present. In this representation, photography turned the material remains into historical artifacts—appreciable at present while leaving their temporality behind in the past. Photographs of the Compendium thus essentialize Beijing into a collection of past artifacts, not to evoke nostalgic sentiments of its pastness, but to reinforce the nationalistic tenor amid China’s building of a nation-state during the 1930s. 

The Persistent Imperial Portrait: Emperor Taishō as Multifarious Icon
Alice Y. Tseng, Boston University

Extant scholarship on imperial portraiture in modern Japan has focused primarily on the emperors Meiji and Shōwa. The creation of the former’s photographic likeness testified to the dramatic modernization process underway in late nineteenth-century Japan, while the circulation of the latter’s reproduced image rallied his people through the lengthy Asia-Pacific War and ensuing postwar rehabilitation in the twentieth century. The emperor in between them, Taishō, has been conspicuously skipped over, although not for a lack of exposure or of consequential historic events during his reign. This paper seeks to address this gap in scholarship by inserting Taishō back into a continuous narrative about visual representation and modernization of the Japanese monarchy.

The use of photography in concert with other artistic and reproductive media allowed for relatively easy circulation of Taishō’s image within the country and abroad. Like his predecessor and successor, he is identified by one iconic formal portrait that endures persistent replication for a variety of sanctioned and unsanctioned formats, objects, and uses. Repetition and manipulation of Taishō’s image effected new conventions for the Japanese emperor as artistic subject, political subject, and popular subject. Through consideration of the mechanical and aesthetic choices that produced wide-ranging iterations of the imperial portrait, this paper pushes the current understanding of the tightly regulated sacred imperial image, the go-shinei, to accommodate a messier history of pedestrian and profane reimagings.

A Proprietor's Instinct: Sculptural Gestures, Decisive Cliches and Segalen's Wild Beasts of Liang
Catherine Stuer, Denison University

In a letter addressed to Edouard Chavannes, dated April 6th 1917, Victor Segalen (1878-1919) reports with confidence that he is “fixing all aspects of the statuary” of Southern Dynasties imperial tomb sites. Referring explicitly to the large-size photographic plates made in situ in the Spring of 1917, executed by unnamed Chinese photographers and accompanied by the curator of sculpture at the Louvre, this representational project has so far mainly been discussed as an authorial act of aesthetic or archaeological discovery. My paper will argue that the photographs per se require unpacking, not only because they stood at the heart of his renewed plans for a personal, grand narrative of Chinese sculptural art, self-consciously aiming to occupy pride of place in the photographic canon of the discipline. Reinserting these into a highly competitive network of visual and textual production, I will explore the position of Segalen’s photos at the intersection of mediatic appropriation, disciplinary practices in sculptural photography, and wartime aestheticization of masculinity and the colonial body.

Utsushi: Imaging Art and Antiquities in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Chelsea Foxwell, University of Chicago

What did photography do for the (art) object in late nineteenth-century Japan? From the 1870s onward, the status of antiquities (kobutsu 古物) was in flux due to the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the Westward-oriented policies of the new government. Previous scholars focusing on the work of Ogawa Isshin (Kazumasa) 小川一真 (1860-1929) have argued that the collective image of Buddhist statues and other objects he photographed was formed through reference to Western photographic conventions, which were used to visually constitute them as “art” in the context of Japanese nationalism. While these observations are significant, they do not represent the earliest phase of photographing the art historical artifact in Japan. In contrast to this later period of standardization and nationalization of the art object, I argue that there was an earlier moment in the 1870s that was more distant from the Western Orientalist drive to acquire and comprehend Eastern objects. I focus on the photography by Yokoyama Matsusaburō 横山松三郎 (1838-84) of sites and antiquities associated with the Jinshin Survey (Jinshin kensa 壬申検査) of 1872. By examining the photographs and associated textual materials for Yokoyama and for his patron Ninagawa Noritane蜷川式胤 (1835-82), I argue that the earliest Japanese photographs of antiquities were far more continuous with earlier, pre-photographic approaches toward transcribing the “art” object than we tend to assume.

The Devil is in the Details: A Study of the Costume of Chinese Officials in Nineteenth-Century Photographs
Daisy Yiyou Wang, Curator of Chinese and East Asian Art, Peabody Essex Museum

One of the most depicted and prominent Chinese subjects in nineteenth-century photographs is the official, or the “mandarin” known to Westerners. Sartorial attributes provide critical clues to their identity, intended spectatorship, and the occasion when the photographs were taken. This paper focuses on a group of portraits of Chinese officials created by Chinese and non-Chinese photographers and studios from the 1840s to 90s. Supplementary to this core group of research materials are nineteenth-century Chinese garments and accessories.

Through the sartorial lens, this paper analyzes how photography as a newly emerged visual representational technology constructed the image of Chinese officials as an emblem of China, its government and its military force. A comparative study of paintings and photographs of Chinese officials as well as portraits of Chinese and non-Chinese officials situates photography and clothing culture in a broader realm of visual culture and in a cross-cultural context. This paper demonstrates that while vestimentary attributes of Chinese officials did not change radically in the nineteenth century, their meanings shifted significantly against the backdrop of China’s domestic and international politics. Moreover, while drawing on earlier visual conventions, photography led to new ways of staging and fashioning the image of Chinese officials sartorially.

Buddhism and Photography: How Both Came to Matter in China around 1900?
Eugene Wang, Harvard University

The revival of Buddhism and the emergence of photographic medium in China around the turn of the twentieth century is no coincidence. Nor is it accidental that sensitive minds of the time—e.g. Kang You (1858-1927) and Tan Sitong (1865-1898)—were drawn to both. The confluence of the two spheres of experience at the time reveals a particular disposition of the Chinese quest for modernity. Instead of the presumed hardening of the familiar oppositions (e.g., mind vs. matter, religion vs. science, or belief in paranormality vs. empirical disbelief), spiritual yearning and technological aspiration were in fact closely aligned. Their synergy, however, is not necessarily the kind that surged around the Euro-American spirit photography. Rather, its energy stems from a paradox: verisimilitude breeds a growing disenchantment with the real, which in turn feeds the Buddhist conviction about the world as illusion.

Drape, Dream, Journey: The Art of Photographic Advertising in Meiji Japan’s Department-Store Magazines and the Commodification of Japanese Elite Culture
Julia Sapin, Western Washington University

As Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida, a photograph “points a finger at certain vis-à-vis,and cannot escape this pure deictic language.” For Japanese consumers during the Meiji period, advertising photography created a more direct connection than ever before between consumer and consumable, whether the commodity was product, prestige, or place. Advertising photography, in particular that which graced the pages of department-store magazines, embedded elite values into the commodification of Japanese culture. Advertising photography allowed shoppers to experience the stores’ rich material goods, their grand architecture and interiors, and suggestions of sophisticated cultural pursuits through the pages of these magazines, bringing the sensation of direct access to these commodities even to remote mail-order customers. Each of the three primary categories of photographic subjects—product, figure, and landscape—had the capacity to touch the potential shopper in a unique way, embellishing explorations of sartorial elegance with a sense of visual reign over the store’s physical and psychic enterprises. Advertising photography helped inform a new “scopic regime” in Japan, one which commodified high culture for an audience increasingly blended with members of the growing middle class.

Conceptualizing Art Photography: Visual and Written Rhetoric in Shashin geijutsu
Karen Fraser, Santa Clara University

This paper considers the development of photography as a modern artistic genre in the early twentieth century and the concurrent emergence of new photographic art journals that were key in promoting the field. Following the watershed Foreign Photographic Art Exhibit (Gaikoku shashinga tenrankai) held in Tokyo in 1893, photography journals such as Shashin shimpō (Photographic News, est. 1882) and Shashin geppō (Photography Monthly, est. 1894) began to promote the idea of photography as an art form through articles advocating artistic approaches. However, these two major photography periodicals as well as other new journals published in the first two decades of the twentieth century tended to focus primarily on technical advice, intended to elevate photography as an art form by helping practitioners achieve results that imitated paintings. The inception of the journal Shashin geijutsu (Photography Art), founded by Fukuhara Shinzō and the members of the Shashin geijutsusha group in 1921, marked a distinct shift in the tone of photography journals, to one that articulated a philosophy of artistic photography. Shashin geijutsu was marked by its sophisticated conceptualization of art photography, conveyed through articles that espoused a spiritual and theoretical approach emphasizing photography as an art form with its own distinctive merits separate from painting.  This paper will examine how this philosophy was conveyed via the journal’s articles, but also looks beyond the written rhetoric to examine how the presentation of visual content (works of art as well as artistic photographs) further underscored the value of photography as an artistic endeavor.

War through the Lens: Case Studies of the Photo-Journalists Shen Yiqian and Sha Fei
Kuiyi Shen, University of California, San Diego

The early 1930s was an important period for Chinese art, during which thorough exploration of the different media available in fine and commercial art enabled urban artists to catch up with the practices of their colleagues in the international art world. Especially in Shanghai, one of the most sophisticated and complex metropolises in the world, use of new media, particularly in relationship to the publishing industry, boomed. However, this took place in the context of the increasingly tense relationship between Japan and China. Many Chinese artists, at the same time that they explored the potential of the techniques and the potential functions of new media, became very involved in the rising movement of resistance to Japan.  They adapted the different forms of art at their disposal to reflect peoples suffering in war, with the goal of helping domestic and foreign audiences understand the urgent situation, even in the most far-flung parts of China. This paper takes two photo-journalists, Shen Yiqian (1908-1944) and Sha Fei (1912-1950), as a case study. The photography, drawing, painting, cartoons, and essays produced by each of the two journalists, which were intended to alarm and educate people in their own time, created a coherent body of visual images that tells a certain story of the wartime years and which formed part of the visual imagination and visual memory of all readers of the Chinese mass media.

Who is the Real Hero?: Seeing Doubles in Lang Jingshan’s “Portraits” of Zhang Daqian
Dr. Mia Yinxing Liu, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Bates College

In a 1963 print titled “Who is the Real Hero?” (何者是真雄？), photographer Lang Jingshan used his “jijin” (composite picture) technique and assembled an enigmatic “double portrait” of the renowned painter Zhang Daqian. Zhang is seen seated at the bottom of a rocky mound, looking up at a smaller figure standing on the top of the mound, which is also Zhang, wearing the same dark robe and silver beard. The title question, sounding quite existential, is a verse from Li Shanfu’s (late 9th Century) poem “Bidding Farewell to General Liu on His Military Mission”: “Many nowadays boast martial prowess, but who is the real hero?” The poem is originally an obvious rhetorical question stating that the General is the only authentic hero in a world of imposters. Lang seems also to intend to flatter Zhang as the authentic maestro of contemporary Chinese art. However, in the photograph, when there are two Zhang Daqians, and the two form an intriguing dynamic with “each other,” the title/question becomes more complicated: Is he asking who is the real hero, or who is the true hero? Or which one is the real/true hero? With both figures being Zhang Daqian himself, is Lang asking a cheekier question: Is there a true hero? Or even more provocatively, considering Lang is ostensibly exhibiting his pride in his “jijin” method here by producing a double portrait of Zhang—and therefore Lang is the true author of the splintered “truth,” “reality,” and “authenticity”—is he insinuating that he himself is also a candidate for the elusive status of “hero”?

This paper attempts to delve into this intriguing body of work from Lang Jingshan’s oeuvre, the “double portraits” of Zhang Daqian. While Lang is known today mainly for his landscape works, Zhang has appeared, sometimes more recognizably than others, in many of Lang’s photographic prints since the 1950s. Lang has embedded Zhang in his landscapes, but he also made more conventional portraits of Zhang, including pictures that feature Zhang sitting in studio poses or Zhang active on his Brazilian estate. In these pictures, the doubling and the question “Who is the real hero?” repeatedly presents itself. I argue these “double portraits” on the one hand continue the visual tradition of “shuangshen” (double body) or “erwo” (two “I”s) pictures in late Qing (and earlier) Chinese painting and photography, testifying to the enchantment of technology and medium and performing a spiritual interrogation of identity and “self-hood” in the complex social-political context of Lang’s time. On the other hand, since these are photographic pictures of an artist and often an artist at work, it also proposes inquiries into the notions and anxiety about the “real” and “authentic” in the art-making process, both in painting and in photography. Lastly, I argue that these “portraits,” by dividing up the individual sitter, open up a space of performative ambiguity between the artist and his sitter. In this portraiture of “me” and “myself” of Zhang “the Chinese Picasso” (according to the Taiwanese press in the 1960s), Lang has superimposed himself as an agent and an actor, as an emulator and also an ambitious rival.

Prince Yihuan and the Photographer Liang Shitai: A Case Study of an 1888 Album
Tingting Xu, Ph.D Student, University of Chicago

Prince Yihuan (1840-91), the biological father of the child Emperor Guangxu (Zaitian, 1871-1908), was arguably the first patron of photography among members of the imperial family of Qing. In the 1880s, he commissioned the well-known Canton photographer Liang Shitai (alias See Tay) to undertake series of photo projects. Their cooperation was productive as well as creative. Pictures created include family portraits, documentary shots of court events, and a unique set of fifty-three photos of buildings and sceneries in the prince’s mansion.  The photos are mixed with some portraits in an 1888 album in the Library of Congress’ collection. Through close observation of qualities of the images, with the assistance of textual clues in Draft History of Qing and other court archives, I suggest that these fifty-three architectural photos in this one-of-a-kind album form an independent series loaded with a unique mission. They were made to commemorate Yihuan’s residence at the Taiping Lake to be upgraded to Guangxu’s “Qian-long-di,”a special Qing concept referring to places where the emperors-to-be lived before ascending the throne. Yihuan’s emotional connections with this place together with his political concerns were well processed through Shitai’s artistic arrangements in constructing, titling, retouching and serializing the photographs. This album as an example demonstrates that specific commemorative purposes, as core but oftentimes underlying messages, must be clarified in the first place when discussing formal, stylistic and technical features of photos made for late Qing imperial patrons.

Between Portraiture and Self-Portraiture: Photographing a New Self in Early 20th-Century China
Wu Hung, University of Chicago

This paper investigates the emergence of a new subjectivity in portrait photography in early twentieth-century China. The discussion starts from a close reading of three portraits of three individual men, who took the photographs in early 1912 before cutting off their queues; two of them also recorded the event of taking the picture on the back of the photograph. Whereas the inscriptions offer interesting clues to think about the experiences of individuals at this historical moment, the shared pictorial format of the three photos, in which the subject is positioned in front of a full-length mirror, leads us to trace its origin in portrait photography. Comparing the two photos with earlier portraits employing this representational formula, we find several major changes in the identity of the subject, the function of photographs as physical objects, and the significance of taking such photographs. The paper finally connects the two inscribed photos with some portraits of famous political and cultural figures. Made during the same historical period and all bearing verbal expressions, these images, though taken by anonymous studio photographers, speak out in the first person and project a strong sense of the self. With such characteristics they can be considered images that fall between portraiture and self-portraiture.

Picturing Meishu: Photomechanical Representation of Works of Art in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Periodicals
Yanfei Zhu, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Chicago

In William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844)—the first commercially published book with photographic illustrations, there are two calotype prints capturing the front and profile of a plaster cast of the Hellenistic marble Bust of Patroclus. The photographic reproduction of works of art would gradually replace traditional methods such as drawing and engraving and have a pervasive impact on both the practice of art and the study of art history. In China, mechanical and commercial endeavors of making photographic images of art did not appear until the publication of Shenzhou guoguang ji (National glories of Cathay) in 1908 in Shanghai. Composed of halftone and collotype prints of photographed Chinese antiques, the journal established a norm of representing traditional art that was followed and improved by its imitators throughout the Republican era.
This paper examines the symbiosis of photography and printing as a new medium of promulgating and visualizing fine art in modern Chinese periodicals. Between the two Sino-Japanese Wars (1895-1937), evolving photomechanical printing technologies for representing works of art were employed by scholarly and popular magazines such as Shenzhou guoguang ji, Yilin yuekan (Art circle monthly), Liangyou (The young companion), and Meishu shenghuo (Art and life). The concept of meishu (fine art), introduced and debated by late Qing and Republican intellectuals, was also contested in the photographical print culture. Representing various forms of art—Chinese and foreign, old and new, photographs in Republican journals and pictorials facilitated diverse aesthetical and political understandings of fine art and contributed to the hybridity and multiplicity of modern Chinese art.