Thursday, 21 May 2020
10:00 EDT (3:00 pm UK time)
Prior to the spread of the coronavirus, China trade dominated the headlines, evoking perceptions of contemporary China as manufacturing platform, its Belt and Road Initiative and ongoing trade wars, and the specter of its security apparatus reaching beyond its national borders. In art history, "China trade" references export art and material culture brought back from the Middle Kingdom by merchants, travelers, and military expeditions from the 16th century to the early 20th century.
Up to now, contemporary artists have explored China as factory of the world, working through and with objects, producers, and consumers subject to the brutish cycles of supply and demand and mercurial shifts in global mass consumption, along with mis/representations and exoticizations in revisiting and refashioning Chinoiserie. Aesthetic responses have also looked beyond the movement of mere commodities — such as ideas, labor, religion, and diseases — transmitted at a faster speed and propelled by ever-more efficient means of transport and communication.
Join us for a discussion on how artists and visual culture about and in China have shifted in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The webinar will feature artists and art historians who have continually engaged with China and its received histories, geopolitical boundaries, and hybridized subjectivities, with implications for national and individual identity.
Speakers
Pedith Chan, Assistant Professor of Cultural Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Chan's research interests focus on the production and consumption of art in modern and contemporary China, on tourism and landscape, and on Hong Kong art. Her publications include The Making of a Modern Art World and "In the Name of Ink: the Discourse of Ink Art," and is currently working on "The Making of Scenic China: The Tourism Industry and Visual Representations of Scenic Sites in Republican China," a three-year research project funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. Chan received a PhD in art history and archaeology from SOAS University of London, has also taught at the City University of Hong Kong, and held a curatorial post at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. In Autumn 2020, she will take up a new position in the faculty of the School of Arts at SOAS.
Gayle Chong Kwan, Artist
Chong Kwan's work explores the politics of landscape, travel, trade, and consumption, and ideas of simulacrum, the senses, and the sublime. She has received numerous awards and has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Havana Biennale, and Asia-Pacific Biennale in Berlin. The Tai Kwun Centre, Hong Kong, showed her series Quarantine Archipelago (2019), which has recently entered the New Hall Collection, University of Cambridge, considered one of the largest repositories for contemporary art by women. Chong Kwan gained degrees in fine art (Central St Martins) and politics and modern history (Manchester), an MSc in Communications (Stirling), and will complete a PhD in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. She currently holds the "Capturing Motion" photography residency at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Yinan Song '14, Artist
Song is an artist, designer, and creative technologist based in Chengdu, China, whose works on the spectrum between art and design engage with technology, politics, or both. She has performed and exhibited internationally, and won a Jury's Award at the Crypto Design Challenge in Amsterdam. One could potentially locate her interest in this topic as early as 2013, when she participated in "The Art of Public Health" at the Yale School of Public Health and the Connecticut State Capitol. Song double majored in art and political science at Yale, and received her MA in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art in London. After working in software and design companies, she now runs an art, design, and technology studio called SXSY.
Convenor/Moderator
Nixi Cura '88
Cura's research interests include: art of the Qing dynasty, especially during the Qianlong reign (1736-1795); collecting and antiquarian practices in the Qing dynasty, Republican, and Manchukuo periods; and contemporary Chinese visual culture. At Yale, she read East Asian Studies, then specialized in Chinese painting, Buddhist art, and European Romanesque art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. From 2007 to 2017, Cura inaugurated and was Director of the Arts of China MLitt and PhD programs at Christie’s Education London/University of Glasgow. She was recently Senior Fellow in the Cultural Leadership program at the Royal Academy of Arts, and serves concurrently as Senior Teaching Fellow in History of Art and Archaeology, SOAS University of London, and as Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow.
Registration
Click here to register for this event.
Questions?
Contact: Kyoung Kim or Nixi Cura
Please note: Photos and other forms of recording may be taken at the event and used by the YCL website from time to time.
