The Inscribed Studio Photos
as I-Portrait: Photographing a New Self in Early Twentieth-Century
China
Presented as part of the Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series
This event is free and open to the public. Please join us for a receptio
n following the talk.
Please contact the AHVA Visual Resources Centre for access to the event recording: ahva.v rc@ubc.ca.
Portraiture and self-portraiture are two standard genr es in visual art\, including photography. A self-portrait is a likeness who se subject is the artist him/herself\; a portrait is a representation of a person made by someone else. This lecture investigates some photographs whi ch disrupt this seemingly self-evident classification of images. These exam ples belong to a group of studio portraits that bear the sitters’ inscripti ons. I suggest that when an inscription is imbued with a distinct “I” voice and expresses the sitter’s personal experience and aspiration\, it transfo rms the anonymous portrait into an I-portraits. The main part of the talk d iscusses several images related to the “queue-cutting” movement in early tw entieth-century China\, before and after the Republican Revolution in 1911 that ended the country’s dynastic history. The final section contemplates h ow photography’s media specificity contributes to such transformation.
< p>Wu Hung is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at the Departments of Art History and East Asian Langu ages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He has published widel y on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art. His interest in both ha s led him to experiment with different ways to integrate these conventional ly separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives\, as exempli fied by his Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (1 995)\, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation of Chinese Pictoria l Art (1996)\, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square: the Creation of a Political Space (2005)\, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (2012)\, and Zooming In: Histor ies of Photography in China (2016). Several of his ongoing projects fo llow this direction to explore the interrelationship between art medium\, p ictorial image\, and architectural space\, the dialectical relationship bet ween absence and presence in Chinese art and visual culture\, and the relat ionship between art discourse and practice.Wu Hung is also the direc tor of the Center for the Art of East Asia\, and consulting curator of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. He will be delivering the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Art Gallery in 2019.
LOCATION:Frederic Lasserre\, Room 102 GEO:49.267665;-123.255830 URL;VALUE=URI:https://ahva.ubc.ca/events/event/wu-hung-the-inscribed-studio -photos-as-i-portrait/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ahva.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/37/2021/05/Wu-Hung-Talk-February-8-2019.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 DTSTART:20181104T090000 TZNAME:PST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR