Chao Wang

Chao Wang

Blind Singing Girls and the Respectability of Livelihood in Early Republican Guangzhou, 1911-1927

Friday, October 19th, 3-5 p.m.
Location: CEAS 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)

Discussant: Weichu Wang (PhD Student, History)

On October 19th from 3:00pm to 5:00pm the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop will host Chao Wang (PhD Candidate, History). He will present Blind Singing Girls and the Respectability of Livelihood in Early Republican Guangzhou, 1911-1927, a chapter of his dissertationChao Wang offers the following abstract:

This chapter shows the transformation of self-help among blind singing girls (guji 瞽姬) in early-Republican Guangzhou (1911-1927). These disabled women were sold at an early age by their families to be raised and trained under the tutelage of a foster mother, the elderly former guji who operated private training institutes (tangkou 堂口) in neighborhoods adjacent to business centers. Once they have reached a level of proficiency in singing, young guji will start their career as professional entertainers who were invited to perform in public festivals and family banquets. Republican-era expansion of commercial theatres promoted the social respectability of blind singers by introducing them into bourgeoisie-style teahouses (chalou 茶楼) and securing them with cultured patrons. However, the shifted consuming preference to sighted singers (nüling 女伶) in the 1920s had pushed many blind women out of employment in the teahouse and left them singing on the street. The lower-class guji were forced to engage in sex work for a living. The decline of guji’s respectability, I argue, originated from the negotiation between commercial interest and state regulation, which significantly challenged the moral economy of self-help and pressured a skilled profession to finally degenerate into prostitutes due to survival. Moreover, I demonstrate from the evolution of ableism in the urban entertainment that specific ideas and practices of femininity were constituted by the reconfiguration of a disability.

Screening of Art in Smog with Lydia Chen

Art in Smog 

Screening and Conversation with Director Lydia Chen

Friday, October 12th, 3-5 p.m.
Location: Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Room 157

Joint Event with the Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia Workshop

Introduced by Professor Paola Iovene (East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

Image taken from Lydia Chen’s Art in Smog ( HD / 76 min. / Color / 2018 / Mandarin with English subtitles )

On October 12th from 3:00pm to 5:00pm the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop and Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia Workshop are proud to present a screening of the 2018 documentary feature Art in Smog (76 min. / Mandarin with English subtitles) and conversation with the director Lydia Chen. Art in Smog offers an intimate encounter with four artists and a curator in China, as they pursue their dreams over 25 years of rapid change. Featured are international artists Su Xinping and Xia Xiaowan, painter and antiques connoisseur Mushi, curator Cui Cancan, and painter Chen Hui. The pursuit of art takes them from quiet lives in the 1990s to the extremes of the 2000s to their different paths forward today.

About the Filmmaker:

Lydia Chen has engaged in cultural exchanges between China and the United States since the 1980s. At first she worked for the Foreign Languages Press and studied Chinese painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Later she was communications director for the American Chamber of Commerce in China, associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University, and executive director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. She received her master’s degrees in journalism and Asian studies from the University of California at Berkeley and her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College.

For more information, please visit the film’s official website.

2018 Fall Quarter Schedule

Sun Xun 孙逊 Endopsychic Fire, 2015. Painting Ink and color on Photographic Paper, Silver dust pigment.

Location: Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319, at the Harris School Building (1155 E 60th St)

Time: Friday, 3-5PM

Please note special location or time for some events.

 

10/12   Art in Smog (2018, 76 minutes, Mandarin with English subtitles)

Screening and Conversation with Director Lydia Chen

Introduced by Professor Paola Iovene (East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

Joint Event with Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia Workshop

Time and location: 3-5PM, Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Room 157

 

10/19   Chao Wang, PhD Candidate (History)

“Blind Singing Girls and the Respectability of Livelihood in Early Republican Guangzhou, 1911-1927”

Discussant: Weichu Wang, PhD Student (History)

Time and location: 3-5PM, Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319

 

10/26   Megan Beckerich, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities

“Supernatural Bodies and Censorship in 19th Century Japanese Prints”

Discussant: Minori Egashira, PhD Student (Art History)

Time and location: 4-6PM, Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319

 

11/2   Lilian Kong, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities

Wolf Warrior II: Chinese Nationalism in the Popular Culture and Media Age”

Discussant: William Carroll, PhD Candidate (Cinema and Media Studies + East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

Special time for lunch and screening:

With a screening of “Wolf Warrior II” (战狼2) and catered lunch at Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319, starting at 1PM

 

11/16   Nicholas Lambrecht, PhD Candidate (East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

“Life After Return in Postwar Japan: From Fujiwara Tei to Miyao Tomiko”

Discussant: Nicholas Wong, PhD (Comparative Literature)

Time and location: 3-5PM, Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319

 

11/30   Yuqian Yan, PhD Candidate (Cinema and Media Studies + East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

“Constructing the Ancient: Set Design in Orphan Island Cinema”

Discussant: Pao-chen Tang, PhD Candidate (Cinema and Media Studies + East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

Time and location: 3-5PM, Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319

 

Pedagogy Roundtable: Syllabi Workshop

Sohye Kim, PhD Candidate in EALC; David Krolikoski, PhD Candidate in EALC; Kyle Peters, PhD Candidate in EALC; Yiren Zheng, PhD Candidate in EALC
Pedagogy Roundtable: Syllabi Workshop
Friday, May 18th, 3:00pm-5:00pm in Wieboldt 301N

Please join us Friday (5/18) from 3:00pm-5:00pm as we host a pedagogy roundtable of PhD Candidates from the East Asian Languages and Civilizations department. Roundtable participants will submit drafts of syllabi for the workshop’s consideration, and the following discussion will provide opportunity for workshop participants not only to give feedback on the particular syllabi drafts that have been circulated, but also to consider issues of creating East Asia-related syllabi for undergraduates: balancing area studies and discipline, managing the constraints and benefits of the quarter system, and transforming one’s own expertise and research into teaching material.

The syllabi are available directly below, or at this link. If you have not received the password, or have questions about accessibility, please feel free to contact Helina Mazza-Hilway (mazzah@uchicago.edu) or Susan Su (susansu@uchicago.edu).

Corey Byrnes

Duan Jianyu, Beautiful Dream #7, 2008

Corey Byrnes (Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Asian Languages and Cultures Department, Northwestern University)
“Defining the Chinese Landscape of Desolation in Teaching and Research”
Tuesday, May 1st, 5:00pm-7:00pm in the Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Room 157
Discussant: Pao-chen Tang (PhD Student, Cinema and Media Studies & EALC)
This event is co-sponsored with the Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia Workshop and sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the United States Department of Education.

Please join us Tuesday (5/1) from 5:00pm-7:00pm as we host Professor Corey Byrnes, Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature at Northwestern University. He will present an essay in progress as well as two related syllabi. The following workshop discussion will be an opportunity not only to offer feedback on the essay, but also to address the challenges of combining research and teaching and designing a syllabus based upon one’s research interests. We look forward to the continuation of discussion after the workshop at the catered dinner which will follow.

Professor Byrnes summarizes his essay as follows:

This joint APEA-VMPEA workshop will center on three related documents: an essay in progress entitled “Landscapes of Desolation” and two syllabi for a course with the same name. The essay is part of a broader attempt to reconsider the role of landscape and “tradition” in the context of environmentally conscious visual and literary culture representing Mainland China (mostly). In general, I am interested in how landscape has come to function as both a privileged way to represent environmental problems in China and also a practical ecocritical mode designed to move people and change behaviors. More specifically, in this essay I consider how specific art historical and cultural influences are used in three interconnected “modes” (the documentary, the trompe l’oeil and the fantastical) of what I am calling the “landscape of desolation” to support this practical ecocritical function. The essay extends some of the ideas I explore in my forthcoming book, Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges (Columbia, December 2018), but it emerges more directly from my experiences teaching an upper division seminar on literary and visual responses to environmental degradation in China and Taiwan. For the seminar meeting, I look forward to discussing both the article and also my experience in moving between teaching and researching. As you will see, there is significant overlap between the course materials and the primary and secondary sources I use in the article. The earliest version of this article predates these courses, though the current version really emerged out of my experiences teaching this seminar in the winter of 2016 and again in the winter of 2018.

The paper is available directly below, or at this link. If you have not received the password, or have questions about accessibility, please feel free to contact Helina Mazza-Hilway (mazzah@uchicago.edu) or Susan Su (susansu@uchicago.edu).

Yujie Li

The 28″ bicycle design pattern with specifications, by the Team of Inspection and Research
of the Shanghai Bicycle Manufacturer Association, 1955

Yujie Li (PhD Student in History)
“Birth of the Phoenix Bicycle: Socialist Firm Formation and Industrial Standardization in the Early PRC”
Friday, March 30th, 3-5pm in CEAS 319
Discussant: Spencer Stewart (PhD Student in History)

Please join us Friday (3/30) from 3-5pm as we host Yujie Li (PhD Student in History). She will present a paper to be incorporated into a larger research project. She summarizes the paper as follows:

This paper is a case study on the history of Socialist Transformation of Capitalist Industry and Commerce Movement (1953-1956). It examines how industrial standardization was enforced and achieved in the Shanghai bicycle industry before, during and shortly after the Socialist Transformation. By focusing on the bicycle, this paper sheds light on the technological objectives of machine-tool industries under the particular developing needs of the early PRC. The paper tries to provide a detailed account of the transformation of the Shanghai bicycle industry by probing into the entanglement of the political, economic and technological changes, and particularly, to illuminate private enterprisers’ tactics to find themselves a new position while coming into the Socialist system.

The paper is available directly below, or at this link. If you have not received the password, or have questions about accessibility, please feel free to contact Helina Mazza-Hilway (mazzah@uchicago.edu) or Susan Su (susansu@uchicago.edu).

Yuqian Yan

Yuqian Yan (PhD Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies & EALC)
“Emplacing the Ancient: the Characters and Their World”
Friday, November 10th, 3-5pm in CEAS 319
Discussant: Pao-Chen Tang (PhD Student, Cinema and Media Studies & EALC)
Co-sponsored with the Mass Culture Workshop

Please join us Friday (11/10) from 3-5pm, as we host Yuqian Yan (PhD Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies & EALC). She will present a draft of her dissertation chapter, which she summarizes as follows:

Location shooting was an important feature of Chinese ancient costume films (guzhuang pian) in the 1920s. Filmmakers went beyond confined studio spaces in Shanghai to search for scenic sites to locate familiar tales from the past. What motivated them to incorporate present landscapes in the representations of ancient stories? What kinds of places could be qualified as ancient settings? How did the incorporation of real sites affect audiences’ viewing experiences? This chapter studies Chinese filmmakers’ efforts to integrate contemporary locations into cinematic adaptations of traditional tales. By directly engaging the present in the portrayal of the ancient, filmmakers suggested a different possibility of relating to the past, and demonstrated the new cinematic medium’s special capacity in facilitating a new way to evoke the past through the present.

The paper is available directly below, or at this link. If you have not received the password, or have questions about accessibility, please feel free to contact Helina Mazza-Hilway (mazzah@uchicago.edu) or Susan Su (susansu@uchicago.edu).