Materiality and Affect: Emotion in Chinese Art
Materiality and Affect: Emotion in Chinese Art
We are pleased to announce that Materiality and Affect: Emotion in Chinese Art will take place in person on May 13-14, 2022 at the University of Chicago. This international symposium focuses on multifaceted roles of emotions in Chinese art and visual culture from antiquity to the present. This event is co-organized by Wu Hung (University of Chicago) and Jeehee Hong (McGill University), and hosted by the Center for the Art of East Asia. The two-day event brings together the fields of art history, history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, anthropology, gender study, and ecology.
Materiality and Affect aims to advance the existing narrative on emotion's place in the artistic creation and perception in art historical research and interpretation. In so doing, the project endeavors to engage the general public and generate new vocabularies and concepts for public consideration of the cultural and social dimensions of emotions in art of the past and the present. Recognizing benefits of such social and conceptual approaches to the most fundamental factor in what makes art art.
Talks on Friday and Saturday will be held at the Franke Institute Conference Room, located on the first floor of the Regenstein Library, 1100 E 57th St, Chicago.
Please note: This symposium allows only in-person attendance. Registration is now closed at this time.
This symposium is co-sponsored by Committee on Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies, Canadian Government Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Adelyn Russell Bogert Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities.
Materiality and Affect: Emotion in Chinese Art
DAY ONE, Friday Morning (9am - 1pm)
9 AM Opening remarks: Wu Hung, Chair: Katherine Tsiang
Archaeology and Objects
Lothar von Falkenhausen (UCLA), “Emotions through Mirrors - Some Reflections”
Wu Hung (Univ. of Chicago), “Archaeology of Emotion—Traces of Love in a Seventh-Century BCE Chinese Tomb”
Wei-cheng Lin (Univ. of Chicago), “ “Alas! How Sad It is that Your Life Was Truncated”: Materiality of Li Jingxun’s Tomb”
~ coffee break ~
Religious Art
Anne Feng (Boston Univ.), “Bliss and Vertigo: The Art of the Apsara”
Yuhang Li (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison), “Engineering Religious Bliss at the Qing Court: Jile shijie in the Beihai Park”
DAY ONE, Friday Afternoon (2:30 - 5:30pm)
2:30 PM Chair: Judith Zeitlin
The Body
Eugene Y. Wang (Harvard Univ.), “Cessation: the motion that ends all emotions and how it plays out in Buddhist cave shrines?”
Dorothy Ko (Barnard College), “The Sacrificial Body of Moye: Affect and Materiality in the Forging of Wu Yue Swords”
~ coffee break ~
Female Image and Voice
Grace Fong (McGill Univ.) ZOOM presentation, “Gender and the Construction of Emotion: Poetry on Meiren hua in Late Imperial China”
Mia Yinxing Liu (California College of Arts) ZOOM presentation, “Modernism in a Female Voice: Emotion and Landscape in Fei Mu’s Springtime in a Small Town (1948)”
DAY TWO, Saturday Morning (9am - 12:50pm)
9AM Opening remarks: Jeehee Hong, Chair: Martin Powers
Pictorial
Jeffrey Moser (Brown Univ.), “The Affective Mode in Northern Song Painting”
Jeehee Hong (McGill Univ.), “Affective Fish”
Michele Matteini (NYU) ZOOM presentation, “The Unfinished Business of Hongli's Paintings”
~ coffee break ~
Built Environment
Anne Burkus-Chasson (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) ZOOM presentation, “Making Spaces, Cultivating Emotions: Qi Biaojia's Daily Records on Building a Garden at Yushan.”
Lihong Liu (Univ. of Michigan), “Happy Matter: Feng Zikai’s Glass Architecture and the De - lighted Crystalline Illumination”
DAY TWO, Saturday Afternoon (2 - 6pm)
2PM Chair: Haun Saussy
Calligraphy
Ronald Egan (Stanford Univ.), "What Does Calligraphy Convey? The Calligraphic Thought of Su Shi and Huang Tingjian"
Peter Sturman (UC Santabarbara), “Emotions Perceived and Effaced in Xu Wei’s Drunken Brush”
~ coffee break ~
Print Culture
Hu Ying (UC Irvine), “The Commemorative Volume: Friendship, Mourning and Community”
Shengqing Wu (Univ. of Science and Technology, Hong Kong), “Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: Body and Affect in Guo Jianying’s Cartoons in 1930s Shanghai”
Print version of the program above (please understand that this may be updated closer to the event.)