2023-24 Visual Culture Seminar

One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929‒1939

Dr Paul Bevan (University of Oxford) and Susan Daruvala (University of Cambridge)

Tuesday 17 October 2023, 17:00

Synopsis

Shao Xunmei, poet, essayist, publisher and printer, played a significant role in the publication and dissemination of
journals and pictorial magazines in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. Shao’s poetry has been translated by several
prominent scholars through the years, but remarkably few of his essays have received the same attention, and this is the
first collection of his prose writings to have been published in English. Shao has been described by a phalanx of scholars
as the most seriously underestimated modern cultural Chinese figure. This collection of his writings joins several recent
publications that aim to raise Shao’s literary and historical profile. It will appeal to a broad swathe of readers interested
in the transnational and transcultural dimensions of twentieth-century experience that have become so important for
contemporary scholarship.

The essays in this book, some of which were selected by the writer’s daughter, Shao Xiaohong, include long essays such
as ‘One Man Talking’ and ‘A Year in Shanghai’, as well as several shorter essays on subjects as diverse as the caricatures
of Miguel Covarrubias, woodblock printing and pictorial magazines, all of which were published in Shao’s own magazines.
Although his essays may be less well known than those of other writers of the same period, without his unique and
valuable contribution, the literary, artistic and poetic worlds of twentieth-century Shanghai would have been very
different indeed.

Speaker Bio

Paul Bevan is a freelance Sinologist, researcher, translator and lecturer. From 2020‒2023 he was Departmental Lecturer
in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford and Retained Lecturer in Chinese at Wadham
College. From 2018 to 2020 he worked as Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He
is now an Associate Member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. His latest
book, a translation of The Adventures of Ma Suzhen: An Heroic Woman Takes Revenge in Shanghai, was recently
published by Palgrave Macmillan. He has written two monographs: ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’: Modern Art and Literature in
Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age (Brill, 2020), and A Modern Miscellany – Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao
Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926‒1938 (Brill, 2015).

Susan Daruvala works in modern Chinese literature and film. She is a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge
although now retired from her teaching post in the Department of East Asian Studies. She is the author of Zhou Zuoren
and an Alternative Chinese response to Modernity. Her current research interests focus on Chinese aesthetic discourses,
as well as the modern Chinese essay, the literary scene in Republican China and Chinese film.

Gao Xingjian’s Bilingual Experimentation on the World Stage: Encounters with Translation

Kate Costello (University of Oxford)

Tuesday 28 November 2023, 17:00

Synopsis

Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian is one of the most renowned and controversial writers working in the Chinese
language today. How has bilingualism shaped the contours of Gao’s experimentation? While there is a growing
body of research dedicated to Gao’s role as a cultural intermediary, there is virtually no scholarship on his
translation practice. This talk explores how the activities that undergird translation manifest themselves in his
literary theory, considering how these techniques were transferred to his novels, with varying degrees of
success. Gao’s experimental practice is intimately bound with translation: perhaps fittingly, it is through
translation that his work has received critical acclaim. How does the translation process complicate or
corroborate Gao’s aesthetic vision? Interrogating the transformations that 靈山 (Soul Mountain) undergoes
in translation, this talk will examine how Mabel Lee’s translation upholds Gao’s aesthetic theory more potently
than his own Chinese, before considering what else the novel could look like in English. Kate Costello concludes
her investigation by exploring the effervescent wordplay in his French language plays as the culmination of
decades of metalinguistic experimentation, carrying out the techniques from his early fiction in a new language
and medium.

Speaker Bio

Kate Costello is a Chinese-English translator and doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, specializing in
modern Chinese literature and culture. Her doctoral thesis examines bilingualism, language games and word
play in modern and contemporary experimental literature. Her research focuses on the relationship between
bilingualism and linguistic experimentation, investigating the ways that multiple language competencies are
deployed within a literary text. Paying special attention to the creative manipulation of sound, script and
syntax, her dissertation examines the playful, devious and irreverent ways that bilingual competencies
manifest themselves in experimental writing. She has served as co-convener of the Oxford Comparative
Criticism and Translation Discussion Group and has presented at international conferences including the
American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting, the Modern Language Association annual
convention, the Association for Asian Studies annual conference and the Association for Chinese Literature
and Comparative Literature biannual conference.

Medium Format: Soil Photography, Ecological Mosaics, Dispossession

Dr William Schaefer (Durham University)

Tuesday 20 February 2024, 17:00

Synopsis

Wang Youshen’s installation Mei pingmi (Per square meter) (2014) reconfigures urban ecosystems: Wang
juxtaposes drywall fragments from his repeatedly demolished studios into square mosaics; mosaics of square
photographs of surrounding landscapes; photographic surfaces marked by Wang’s acts of ‘washing’ prints;
and square composites of photographs, water, soil and seeds. The square meter brings the violence of
economic abstraction of land into tension with the aleatory transformations of art-making, human behaviour
and ecological processes.

Per Square Meter engages with what landscape ecologist Richard Forman calls land mosaics: ecological forms
of patches, corridors and matrices created by and determining flows of humans, other organisms, energy and
the media of water and land. Forman has conceptualized landscape ecologies in terms of art media, drawing
upon concepts of point, line and plane that artist Paul Klee derived through study of natural forms, and likening
landscape forms to analogue photography’s framing, grain and resolution.

Both Per Square Meter and the field of landscape ecology begin in brokenness – the fragmentation of land and
environment, habitat loss and dislocation – and turn to mosaics to picture forms and processes of disturbance
and flow, destruction and composition. Framed by Muge’s photographs of landscapes of dispossession in Hui
jia (Going home) (2013), this lecture explores how Wang’s mosaics offer sites for thinking relationships
between art-making and ecosystems; how in contemporary photography, the ecological ceaselessly
reconstitutes relationships between the figurative and the abstract; and how in our ecological crisis the ground
becomes figure even as human figures are left to piece together the grounds they have lost.

Speaker Bio

Dr William Schaefer is Associate Professor in Chinese Studies and Visual Culture in the School of Modern
Languages and Cultures, Durham University.

Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China

Professor Ying Qian, Columbia University

Tuesday 27 February 2024, 17:00

Synopsis

From the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and
post-Mao eras, revolutionary upheavals characterized China’s twentieth century. In this talk, Ying Qian draws
from her newly published book to discuss documentary as deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism
to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements. Situating cinema’s
invention in 1895 in the East Asian context of colonial warfare and revolutionary agitation, this talk excavates
the documentary’s emergence in transnational activism at the turn of the 20th century, traces its development
in political contestation and war propaganda between 1920s and 1940s, and reflects on documentary’s
productivity and crisis during the Mao-era and its reorientation in the post-Mao decade. Arguing that there is
no universal ‘documentary’, but the historical materialization of its potentials, the talk proposes a method to
engage with documentary as an ‘eventful medium’, around which the dialectical relationship between media
practice, political relationality and revolutionary epistemology can be examined.

Speaker Bio

Ying Qian is an associate professor in Chinese Cinema and Media at the Department of
East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. Her first book, Revolutionary
Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia University Press,
2024), excavates documentary’s multi-faceted productivities in China’s revolutionary
movements. She is now working on a new monograph on media and the ecologies of
knowledge in China’s reform and opening. Ying Qian’s articles have appeared in Critical
Inquiry, New Left Review, China Perspectives, New Literary History of Modern
China, Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, and other journals and websites. At Columbia, she teaches
classes on East Asian cinema, Chinese media cultures, documentary media, media of science and technology,
and comparative media theory and history. Drawing from her experiences in filmmaking, she has incorporated
creative assignments in her classes, guiding students to try their hands on media production. She is currently
a senior core fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University.

Worrying about China: Storytelling, Humanitarian Intervention, and the Global Circulation of Independent Chinese Documentary

Dr Luke Robinson, University of Sussex

Tuesday 23 April 2024, 17:00

Synopsis

This talk explores the impact of cross-border collaboration on independent Chinese documentary. Through a
study of Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China (2016), Dr Robinson argues that the film, which passed through training
events run by CNEX and the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Programme in China, bears the formal
impact of the industrial-humanitarian logic central to these workshops: character-driven storytelling. The
latter format is, Dr Robinson argues, understood by transnational stakeholders such as CNEX and Sundance as
key to generating a global Anglophone public for independent Chinese documentary. Tracing this logic through
the workshop mechanism, the film’s form, and audience reactions to its screening in the UK, Dr Robinson
suggests the result is a viewer response privileging personal action over structural critique – what in this
context he terms ‘worrying about China.’ This allows him to locate the documentary in relation to broader
liberal arguments over China’s place in the world system and assess the limitations of this approach to ‘going
global’ for independent Chinese documentary.

Speaker Bio

Dr Luke Robinson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of Media and Film, University of Sussex.
He is the author of Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), and the editor, with Chris Berry, of Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (Palgrave Macmillan,
2017). His writing has appeared in books and journals including DV-made China, The New Chinese
Documentary Movement, Vocal Projections, Screening China’s Soft Power, positions: asia cultures critique, Film
Studies, Screen, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas. He is currently a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded grant
project, ‘Independent Cinema in China: State, Market, and Film Culture’ (2019–2024).

Landscape Paintings and Territorial Sovereignty in Socialist China

Professor Pang Laikwan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Tuesday 14 May 2024, 17:00

Synopsis

This talk discusses how traditional ink brush landscape paintings were repackaged in 1950s China as a new national artform to embody the glory of the new sovereign power. These paintings, many of them now crowned as ‘Red Classics’, reveal the mutual appropriation between the socialist nation-building and traditional Confucian and Daoist aesthetics. With the new regime defining the political and aesthetic agenda, these works were invested with heavy political, aesthetic and economic values. Painters were subjected to intense political scrutiny, but some also took the opportunity to keep painting. This talk also analyzes the assumption behind territorial sovereignty, and how traditional Chinese paintings were tasked to aestheticize the natural scenery as an abstract possession of the new sovereign power.

Speaker Bio

Pang Laikwan is Choh-Ming Li Professor of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of a few books, including One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty (Stanford UP, 2024), The Appearing Demos: Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement (U of Michigan P, 2020), The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution (Verso, 2017) and Creativity and its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses (Duke UP, 2012).