A Connective History of Qing Art: Visuality, Images and Imaginaries

Participants

Miriam Basilio is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at New York University, where she has been since 2005. She was previously Curatorial Assistant at The Museum of Modern Art, where she co-curated Tempo (2002) and Latin American and Caribbean Art: MoMA at El Museo (2004). Her research interests include the history of visual, print, and exhibition culture during the Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship and contemporary art, museums, and the the politics of memory today, the subject of her first book. Another are of research interest is the history of collection displays at The Museum of Art during the 1940s-1950s in relation to the creation of the category “Latin American art” in the United States, as it moved within, and outside of, the Western Modernist canon, the subject of her second book. She has published in publications for exhibitions held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Museu Picasso, Barcelona, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.

Chen Kaijun is completing his PhD degree at Columbia University. He received his B.A (2005) in from Fudan University, Shanghai and his Maitrise from Sorbonne-Paris I in 2007. He was a Mellon visiting fellow at Needham Research Institute of Science and Technology in Cambridge, UK. His dissertation focuses on the porcelain production in Jingdezhen under Tang Ying’s supervision during the first half of 18th century. His research interest concentrates on the cultural history of craftsmanship and the transmission of practical knowledge via media including illustration, textual treatise and accomplished products, especially ceramics and textile. In his free time, he dips into the art of Central Asia.

Lisa Claypool is Associate Professor of Art History, Design, and Visual Culture, and the Mactaggart Art Collection Curator. She publishes widely on Shanghai’s visual culture, exhibition culture in China, and has curated and published a series of essays and interviews about contemporary art. She is currently at work on two projects: a book about the mediation of science through visual arts in Republican-era Shanghai, and; a collaborative curatorial project about China’s “Imperial Modern,” focusing on “modern” modes of painting practice, fashion, and material culture during the last dynasty.

Nixi Cura read East Asian Studies at Yale University, then specialised in Chinese painting, Buddhist art, and Romanesque art, at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her current research interests include art of the Qing Dynasty, especially during the Qianlong reign (1736-1795), collecting and antiquarian practices during the Republican and Manchukuo periods, and contemporary Chinese visual culture. She published a cultural biography of the Admonitions scroll during the Qianlong reign. She has been Course Director of the Arts of China graduate program at Christie’s Education London since its inception in 2007 and concurrently serves as Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow.

John Finlay is an independent scholar based in Paris. He has recently completed a dissertation for Yale University’s History of Art Department on the 1744 Qianlong imperial album, “40 Views of the Yuanming yuan.” Formerly a museum curator, his research now focuses on the artistic and intellectual relations between France and China in the eighteenth century.

Roslyn Lee Hammers teaches courses on Chinese painting, South Asian art, and Asian architectural history. She was an assistant professor of art history and visual culture studies at Whitman College, Washington state, before taking her position at the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Hammers has published the book Pictures of Tilling and Weaving: Art, Labor and Technology in Song and Yuan China (Hong Kong University Press, 2011). She was a fellow at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge University, U.K. as well as at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, D.C. Her interests include Song and Yuan dynasty artistic practices, the relationships between technological imagery and art, and cross-cultural reception of art between Asia and non-Asia.

Guo Hui is a lecturer at Department of Archaeology and Museology in Nanjing Normal University, China. She received her PhD with the dissertation “Writing Chinese Art History in Early Twentieth-Century China” from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Major interests include historiography of art history in late Qing and early Republican period; art museums and exhibitions in twentieth century China.

Joan Kee is an Assistant Professor in the History of Art department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A specialist in contemporary art in East and Southeast Asia, her articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications, the most recent of which examines the distinction between size and scale in post-1949 ink painting in mainland China.

Kristina Kleutghen is Assistant Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2010. Her research focuses on late imperial Chinese art produced in response to European contact, particularly at the High Qing (1661-1799) court during China’s long eighteenth century. She is currently completing her first book, Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in Eighteenth-Century China, which rediscovers the monumental illusionistic paintings produced collaboratively by Chinese and European court painters for the Emperor Qianlong (r. 1736-1795). These massive paintings, mounted on palace walls and still hidden inside the Forbidden City, not only illustrate the emperor’s most private interests and concerns, but also reflect the period’s empire-wide engagement with theatricality, illusionism, Europeanoiserie, and pictorial animation.

Yeewan Koon is Assistant Professor at The University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and specializes in paintings in late imperial China. Her primary research focuses on art in the Guangdong region during the Qing dynasty, and she is currently completing her manuscript: The Defiant Brush: Su Renshan (1814-c.1850) and the Politics of Painting in Early Nineteenth Century Painting. She is also working on a project on copies, emulations, and pictorial ciphers in Ming painting.

Francesca Dal Lago is Associated Researcher at the Centre de Recherches sur les Civilisations de l’Asie Orientale, U.M.R. 8155 in Paris. She holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University with a focus on early forms of Communist visual propaganda and its connection with folk arts.  She has worked and written extensively on contemporary and political Chinese art of the 20th century. She is now in the process of writing two books: China on Display: A collection of essays on modern and contemporary forms of display of Chinese art and material culture; Drawing Modernity, which examines the influence of French artistic education on the practice of 20th century Chinese art.

Lai Yuchih is an Assistant Researcher at the Academia Sinica. She was formerly curator at the National Palace Museum. Research interests include intercultural relationships between China and the outside world, Qing court art, and Shanghai art worlds. She received her PhD from Yale University in 2005.

Liu Lihong is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is currently writing her dissertation which centers on the late work of Wen Zhengming (1470-1559), concerning the issue of pictorial construction of place. This project in general considers the significance of “relational positioning” of things in space, in both place-making and in painting practice, during the mid-Ming period. Another interest is Qing court painters’ practices. She has done extensive research on certain court painters like Chen Mei (ca. 1694-1745), who, apart from their court commissions, have remained obscure as individual artists in Chinese painting history; her focus on those painters is the latter.

Her writings of several catalogue entries are forthcoming in the exhibition catalogue Invitation to Reclusion (Santa Barbara & New York, 2013), which include Shitao’s Landscape Album for Huang Lü (the County Museum at Los Angeles), Landscape, a long handscroll, painted by Shen Shichong (Private Collection), and Landscape Collection Album, painted by Song Jue, Gu Ningyuan, Hu Yukun, Fei Erqi, and Mei Geng (Private Collection).

Michele Matteini is Assistant Professor of art history and the humanities at Reed College. Co-curator of the exhibition Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping, he has contributed essays to such publications as RES, and, most recently, to the upcoming catalog of the Seattle Art Museum and the anthology Yangzhou: A Place in Literature. His current researches include the study of master-pupil exchange, the reception of Yangzhou painting in early twentieth-century criticism, and the relationship between painting and antiquarianism. He is at work on a manuscript that examines Luo Ping’s late artistic practice in the context of Beijing’s Xuannan culture.

Jenny Purtle is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. She teaches areas of Chinese art and visual culture from the Six Dynasties to the present, in particular, the cultural geography of artistic production, urbanism, East/West exchange, optics and optical media, Chinese contemporary art and its various historical and geographical contexts. She is currently Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of Visual Art, National Gallery of Art.

Cole Roskam is an Assistant Professor of architectural history and theory in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate level courses on topics in architectural and urban history. His research focuses on early 20th century Chinese architectural history, colonial and postcolonial built environments in Asia, and architectural development in China since the Cultural Revolution. His writing has appeared in Artforum and Orientations. He is currently working on a book manuscript based upon his dissertation, Civic Architecture in a Liminal City: Shanghai, 1842-1937.

Greg M. Thomas is Professor of art history at The University of Hong Kong. A specialist in 18th– and 19th-century European art, he has published books on French landscape painting and French Impressionism. He has also published articles on intercultural interactions between Europe and China, part of a large research project focused on the imperial palace of Yuanming Yuan.

Stephen Whiteman is now completing two years as Visiting Assistant Professor at Middlebury College, where he has taught the art, architecture and landscape history of East Asia. He has recently been named the A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, a position he assumes in September 2012. Whiteman received his doctorate from Stanford University in 2011. His current research explores the imagination and creation of cultural and political landscapes in the early Qing court, particularly through garden-building, image-making and textual inscription, for which he has received recent support from the Dumbarton Oaks, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and the Graham Foundation. Portions of this work are forthcoming in an edited volume on the use of geography in the study of Chinese history, the journal Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, and as part of a new series translating historic texts on gardens from Dumbarton Oaks.

Cheng-hua Wang is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei. Author of the book Art, Power, and Consumption: One Perspective on the History of Chinese Art, she is an art/cultural historian who is currently working on two book projects. The first tackles the issues revolving around the emergence and popularity of cityscapes in early modern China. The second investigates the categorization of antiquities in modern China, focusing on issues such as heritage preservation and exhibition culture.

Roberta Wue is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine.  Her research investigates the visual culture of late Qing China, with a particular interest in the relationships between image makers, images and their various audiences.  She has published on painting, photography and advertising in nineteenth-century China; her current book project focuses on the nineteenth-century Shanghai art world and its interactions with a new urban audience through multiple channels such as painting, illustrated books, portraiture and the mass media.