Fwd: Fw: Roberta Wue on Photographic Chinoiserie (with correct link this time!)

[Olivier Krischer]

Dear colleagues, 

Please join us for the first lecture in this year's Sydney Asian Art Series, "Troubling Images": 

ROBERTA WUE: Photographic Chinoiserie: John Thomson and the Chinese Export Image
14 April 2022, 11:00am-12:15pm

This is followed by another three online talks throughout the year, all of which are open for registration on the SAAS website: http://www.powerpublications.com.au/saas2022/

THY PHU: Warring Visions: Vietnam Pictorial and the Colours of Socialist Futurity
12 May 2022, 10:00-11:15am

CHRISTOPHER PINNEY: Citizens of Photography: Demotic Visual Practices in South Asia
29 September 2022, 6:00-7:15pm

MIRYAM SAS: Realism and Media: Reconsidering Japanese Women Photographers
10 November 2022, 11:00am-12:15pm

regards,

Olivier Krischer

 

Upcoming Online Lecture

Roberta Wue Photographic Chinoiserie: John Thomson & the Chinese Export Image Thursday, 14 April 2022 11:00am - 12:15pm (AEST) Online lecture & discussion. You will receive a Zoom link upon registration. Register Can China and the Chinese be encapsulated in an image? The photographer John Thomson (1837-1921) appears to answer this question with the first photographic book on China, his monumental Illustrations of China and Its People (1873-74). Relying on intertwined texts and images, Thomson’s book represents China through his authority as traveler, guide, and expert, and by employing quasi-scientific systems of information such as ethnography and geography. However, understanding Thomson’s work as vehicles of information alone, omits its relationship with longstanding visual discourses around ideas of China. It is generally accepted that Chinese export art served as an important predecessor to early China photography yet how do chinoiserie fantasies make their way into Thomson’s photography and his “documentary” ways? This talk will address the Scottish photographer’s engagement with Chinese trade art and its producers, and his own desires to imitate, reproduce, and enter this fictive world. In grappling with ideas of China, how does Thomson connect photography to the Chinese export image? Roberta Wue is associate professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. She has published on painting, photography, print culture, and advertising in modern China. She is author of Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai (Hong Kong University Press, 2014) and co-editor with Luke Gartlan of Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan (Ashgate/Routledge, 2017). Most recently she is interested in serial images (such as comics), drawing, and the book format in Republican-era China. Image: John Thomson, "Peking Peep Show," from Illustrations of China and Its People, (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1874), vol. 4, plate 27. The Power Institute is a Foundation based at the University of Sydney. We are dedicated to understanding the visual world through art and visual culture. We support research, publish texts, and organise public programs. The Power Institute would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land upon which the University of Sydney, and the Power Institute, is built. As we share our own knowledge, teaching, learning and research practices, may we also pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal Custodianship of Country.

Share this email: Manage your preferences | Opt out using TrueRemove® Got this as a forward? Sign up to receive our future emails. View this email online. The University of Sydney Camperdown, | 2006 AU This email was sent to olivier....@sydney.edu.au. To continue receiving our emails, add us to your address book.