Chair/discussant: David Wang (Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department, Harvard University)
This talk investigates the visual configurations, rhetorical conventions, and fundamental concepts underlying China’s portrait photography in the early twentieth century. By surveying pictorial magazines, photo albums of courtesans, and poems written about new visual experiences, it addresses issues of how portrait photography was understood and practiced in the flourishing urban culture, and how traditional aesthetics, visual tropes, and Buddhist concepts were involved in adopting and indigenizing the new visual media. The complex interactions of modern technology and aestheticism, image and text, reveal that aesthetic tradition was deeply implicated in the cross-cultural exchanges of technologies and power in the formation of China’s urban culture and visual modernity, further enriching our understanding of optical truth and illusion.
Upcoming Events
Visiting Scholar Talks
From Serampore to Singapore: The Making of the Missionary Enterprise to China (1800-1840)Friday, April 5, 2024
Visiting Scholar Talks
Does the Sino-Tibetan Language Family Exist? — A Fresh Exploration of the Historical Relationship Between Tibetan, Chinese, and Surrounding LanguagesWednesday, April 10, 2024
Visiting Scholar Talks
Between Mundus and Tianxia: Chinese Cartographic Syncretism in the 17th and 18th CenturiesThursday, April 25, 2024