Musings on East Asian Art from the Rockies
On January 17, 1995, the northern side of Japan’s Awaji Island suffered the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. Some 310,000 people were evacuated to temporary shelters. The disaster devastated Kobe, a city of 1.5 million residents on Awaji Island. Shigeru Ban explains that this was the first time he had ever seen such wreckage and living conditions: … Read moreShigeru Ban’s Paper Houses
What is it about walls that brings out our most vulnerable forms of creativity? From the Great Wall of China, to the Berlin Wall, to the long-proposed Mexico-United States barrier, these contentious sites seem to be a sort of crossroads for political and social reckoning. Whether stacked brick by brick, sculpted from corrugated metal, tubes, … Read moreBorders as Spaces of Reckoning
This week’s text by David Allen Pietz revealed just how imperative the Yellow River is to China’s (and arguably, the entire globe’s) ecological and economic stability. What stood out to me most was Pietz’s claim that “coupled with demographic growth, which is projected to continue until 2050, economic expansion will test the environmental capacity of … Read moreDevastation and Representation: The Yellow River
Jennifer Weisenfeld’s poignant chapter in Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1932 gave tons of insight on the spectacle and aesthetics of disaster in Japanese history, particularly regarding ‘divine punishment’ for a tumultuous political climate. As a fan of film history, Weisenfeld’s text prompted me to watch Kanto Taishin … Read moreThe fourth wall crumbles: intersections of disaster and aesthetics in Japanese history
Catherine Dormor’s analysis of textile as viscous substance tied some of my personal research interests—namely materiality and its interactions with the body—into this week’s discussion. Taking Sartre’s definition of viscosity as that which is “neither material (and physical) nor psychic, about which transcends the opposition of the physical by revealing itself as an ontological expression … Read moreThe ‘Unbearable Gift of Memory’: Textiles, Materiality, & the Body
Is art history an inherently Western discipline? What problems arise when art historians study non-Western objects? In what ways do we see colonialism manifest in the study of Gandharan art during the late 19th century? Stanley K. Abe expertly addresses these lofty questions (and more) in his in-depth essay titled “Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist … Read moreFaith and Colonialism in “Greco-Buddhism”
At the risk of exposing my own ignorance, this week’s selections from The Modern Girl Around the World were incredibly eye-opening in how they situated the concept of the “Modern Girl” in a global context. What stood out the most was that above all else, the Modern Girl was distinguished from other female figures and … Read moreFlappers… In Japan?
”Here Japanese objects were presented alongside those of the Ainu, an Indigenous community in northern Japan of distinctly non-Japanese linguistic and ethnic identity. On the other hand, Japanese paintings were represented in the prints and drawing gallery, and other objects, such as ‘porcelain, metal work, lacquer ware, and netsuke, were displayed as ‘works of art’ … Read moreThe Brooklyn Museum’s Ainu Robe
In “Shanghai Modern: Reflections on Urban Culture in China in the 1930s,” Leo Ou-fan Lee examines the many factors which contributed to the golden age of Shanghai urban culture. During the early twentieth century, Shanghai was the center of China’s new media culture, connected by the major nodes outlined in this chapter: architecture and urban … Read more“Intrinsically Chinese/Profoundly Anomalous”: Shanghai’s Modernism(s)
Judge, by the Chinese avant-garde artist Wei Dong (b. 1968), is modeled after the conventional deposition of Christ scene—I have included here depictions of this same scene by Raphael and Caravaggio for reference. Wei Dong’s adaptation of the scene features a hyper realistic nude Asian woman (so realistic, in fact, that upon first glance I thought Judge was … Read moreWei Dong’s ‘Judge’
