Organizer: David W. Pankenier, Lehigh University
Chair: Norman J. Girardot, Lehigh University
Photographic Portraits from Nineteenth-Century China
Régine Thiriez, EPHE, Paris
During the nineteenth century photographic portraits of Chinese men and women were produced in great quantity; many have survived. Portrait has a long history in China. The opening of the port towns to international trade in the middle of the century brought about the development of a photographic version.
Through a survey of photographs from both private and public Western collections, I will analyze and compare the images, in order to identify the essential aspects or defining elements of photographic portrait as an art form in China.
Three major factors contributed, singly or concurrently, in shaping these early photographic portraits of men, women, families and groups of adults. They are: contemporary photographic culture; Chinese traditions; and the market demand for-or society's use of-these images.
The specific issues I will address in the paper are: (1) the distinction between real portraits, in which the customer selects the scene and is supposedly the sole user of the image, and contrived commercial photography, where a paid model submits to the photographer's request; (2) the setting and paraphernalia which soon became specific and consistent in portrait photography in China; (3) the balance between the Chinese known requirements, such as the full frontal stance, and the practices evidenced on the prints; and (4) the predominance of female rather than male portrait subjects, which is both a regional factor, linked to the courtesan influence particularly felt in Shanghai, and the reflection of a theme central to exotic photography.
E. C. Bridgman and the Coming of the Millennium: The Theological Roots of
American Sinology
Michael C. Lazich, SUNY at Buffalo
Sent to China in 1829 by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Elijah Coleman Bridgman contributed immensely to America's knowledge and understanding of Chinese civilization through his extensive writings on the country's history and culture in publications such as the Chinese Repository. He also contributed to the production of a variety of informative works in Chinese, including his Short Account of the United States of America (Meilike Heshengguo Zhilüe) and the East-West Monthly Examiner (Dong Hsi Yang Kao Meiyue Tongji Zhuan), which through their "diffusion of useful knowledge" introduced many Chinese readers to a range of essential information regarding the world outside of the "Middle Kingdom."
E. C. Bridgman viewed the worldwide expansion of human knowledge as a key component of God's plan for universal redemption; and the emerging international order, under which all nations would enjoy equal rights and be bound by equal responsibilities, as a natural accompaniment of the prophesied Christian Millennium. The larger significance of Bridgman's scholarship cannot, therefore, be understood outside of the context of the distinctive millenarian vision that lay at the core of early nineteenth-century Evangelicalism, nor can its impact be fully appreciated without taking into account the emerging intercultural dynamics of the age in which he lived. Ultimately, E. C. Bridgman's vision of the coming of the Millennium was both fulfilled and belied by the fruits of his long career as America's first missionary to China.
The Transfer of Telegraph Technology to China in the Nineteenth Century: Cultural
Tensions and Assimilation
Erik Baark, Technical University of Denmark
The transfer of advanced technology continues to be an important challenge for China's modernization. The paper examines some of the dilemmas faced by the Chinese modernizers of the late nineteenth century when telegraphs arrived via Shanghai and Hong Kong. The Chinese attitudes to the telegraph were skeptical, and the technology was rejected by the Qing government, partly on account of the priorities of sovereignty, but also because the physical appearance of the telegraph, with wires and poles stretching across the countryside, evoked suspicions of harmful effects related to the fengshui geomantic ideas. One of the revealing episodes was an aborted attempt in 1874-76 to construct a land line between the two cities of Fuzhou and Xiamen on the southern coast of China. Several attempts to erect the line came to a halt because people tore down the telegraph poles and stole the wire. Nevertheless, a rapid expansion of the telegraph network to major cities in China was undertaken during the 1880s. The paper examines the tensions which existed between Chinese and foreign actors in the telegraph sector, focusing in particular on the activities of the Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company.
Visuality, Flux and Effacement: Remapping the Tender-Hearted Journey of the
Modern Chinese Subject
Xinmin Liu, Yale University
In the rich lore of Chinese modernity, two travelogues by Qü Qiubai (1889-1935), Journey to the Land of Hunger and History of the Heart in the Red Capital, stand out with their meditative mood, intermingled styles and above all, visualized mode of conception. Describing his trip to Moscow in 1920 in an introspective manner reminiscent of Malinowski's Polynesian diary, Qü's two books offer us a rare vantage to observe how visuality helps the modernist's repressed literary impulses resurface and refashion his conceptual frame.
At the outset of his career of political journalism, Qü's search for a new social reality leads him out of the sedate world of poetic transcendence to embrace the psychologized worldview of weishi Buddhism. While mediating Buddhist ontology with Bergson's vitalism, Qü becomes infatuated with the visuality of the "great flux" and its affinity with the mass psychology of the Leninist socialist state. He uses the specular grid to interface the Buddhist Mind's "mirror-imaging" with Bergson's "great flux" in order to unravel the way in which social movements impinge on the individual consciousness. But as he struggles over the ontological rift between the imminent and the empiricist ways of knowing, his sight gains advantage over his sentient body as a parallel to the ruinous deterioration of his physical conditions due to TB. His dysfunctional body converts him to a total spectator, which unfortunately completes the diminution of his embodied self.
In sum, Qü's idea of the "private self" informed by the Buddhist demiurgic will steadily gives way to the "social self" as a result of a self-effacement, and eventually turns him into a devout minion to Marxist social theories of class conflicts and the mass movement.
Consuming the Other: Representations of Western Women in Chinese Advertising
Perry Johansson, Stockholm University
In everything from dress dummies to TV advertisements to fashion magazines, a Western beauty ideal dominates the rapidly emerging consumer culture in contemporary China. Scholars have noted how advertisers employ images of Western women to surround the products they seek to sell with an atmosphere of modernity and style. Moreover, representations of Western women frequently display a happiness, hedonism and nudity that is seldom found in ads featuring Asian models.
This paper unpacks this construction of a Western woman in the consumerist discourse of advertising and media in contemporary China. It does this first through readings of the semantics of some images employed in ads in Nüyou (A Woman's Friend), Hunyin yu Jiating (Marriage and Family), and Shijie Shizhuang zhi Fan (ELLE). Moreover, drawing on interviews with Chinese women, advertising personnel, and women's magazine editors, the paper discusses what the representations of Western women signify to the audience of Chinese women to whom they are addressed and the rationale behind magazines' and advertising agencies' use of these images. Drawing on these analyses and these sources, I argue that this construction of a Western Other is a kind of "Occidentalism," mirroring the Western construction of an Orient Other. These Occidentalist representations have profound implications for still nascent understandings of Chinese consumer culture in particular and of contemporary China in general.