Portraits and Regulations in Early Republican Shanghai Art

Portraits and Regulations in Early Republican Shanghai Art

Date: 17 March 2015 (Tuesday)
Time: 5:30-7:00pm
Venue: Room 7.58, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus

This presentation looks at the growing visibility of “portraits” in Shanghai and argues that it was tied to the changes in regulatory acts in the 1910s and the 1920s. It was during this time when authorities began to use photographs in official documents such as passport and license as an enhanced form of control and surveillance. The manipulation of their uses in other forms and spaces reveals how the portrait became a familiar form at all levels. For example, the increase use of human faces in advertising as trademarks led to its inclusion in the “trademark law” of 1923.

In this paper, I map out how portraits were used as a form of legal and administrative identification, and examine two ways in which this affected the art world. First, the artists assimilated a similar kind of formality to their series of graduation self-portraits. Second, I investigate how one artist, Jiang Xiaoqian 江小鶼 (1892-1939), perhaps as a reaction to the idea of photographic portrait as a singular identity by juxtaposing a series of double-portraits as a response to the seemingly unlimited expansion of portraiture in the larger visual culture of Shanghai.

Speaker: Alice Wong (PhD Candidate, Department of Fine Arts, HKU)