The “New Media in China” Colloquia are a year-long series of programs sponsored by the Luce Foundation that will bring outstanding scholars, visual artists, writers, and documentarians from around the world to address various aspects of media in China, from the emergence of new media in early China, to modern print culture, the impact of the internet on journalism, and the use of new media to document contemporary social and cultural transformations.
This workshop will provide an intimate and focused forum for the sustained discussion of ‘new media’ in premodern China—by which we indicate media in the moment of their historical emergence. We are interested, in other words, in exploring how these ‘new’ media (be they oracle bones, cast bronzes or other inscribed surfaces, new systems of writing or image-making, or forms of print culture) have arisen, and how they have worked to transform preexisting cultural and social institutions and systems of cultural production and signification, addressing both individual case studies, as well as the larger methodological issues involved in thinking through the question of media studies in a premodern context.
Bonnie Cheng, Assistant Professor, Art History, Oberlin College
“Set in Stone: New Media or New Interpretations?”
Sarcophagi of Song Shaozu (L) and Shi Jun, late 5th and late 6th centuries
Stone as a medium in China conjures immediate associations of ancient Confucian shrines or steles bearing lengthy inscriptions, yet a passage from the History the Wei on the use of stone as material for a pagoda in Pingcheng marvels at its use in late fifth century construction. My presentation will examine the atmosphere in which stone was perceived as an innovative medium in early medieval China by tracking funerary structures (e.g. coffins or sarcophagi) that adopt stone both as a surface for decoration and material for construction. Typically examined as hybrid objects built for foreigners who lived in north China and broken up into disparate "traditions," I will explore how artistic and cultural traditions are imbricated in the stone medium and examine the various conduits of the material's reconfiguration, including the rise of cultural exchange along the Silk Road and the presence of Turkic rulers and other non-Chinese with new belief systems in the north China terrain.
Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Associate Professor, Chinese and Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Travel Documents and Talismans in the Han Dynasty”
Beidoujun
Personal or institutional authority does not travel well. With the emergence of complex forms of bureaucratic authority – both spiritual and earthly – in the Han Dynasty, the need for authenticating authority spurred innovation in both texts and media. When a person left the center for the periphery, the existence of an unambiguous way to distinguish authentic travel documents from forgeries could be a matter of life or death.
Today, when we need to authenticate authority we use a plastic card with a magnetic strip, currency with intricate ink designs printed on special paper, or a unique letterhead, watermark, signature or “PIN number.” Similar impulses were in part behind the use of elaborate conventional language and scarce media in the pre-imperial period for contracts and sumptuary vessels. In addition, the label “tally, talisman” (fu ?) was applied to objects that carried with them institutional authority, and that were, through words or media, self-authenticating. In the early empire, several linked genres trace the quest for self-authenticating documents across both texts and media. This paper will examine formal similarities between excavated “letters to the underground” (gaodi shu
告地書) and “tomb-quelling texts” (zhenmu wen
鎮墓文), and their relationship to contemporaneous protective talismans and tomb steles. Central to the function of these genres was their invocation of a higher spiritual authority to quell spirits and demons lower on the status continuum. By examining the genres that were around during the formative period for the important Daoist genre of talisman, the choice of both media and simulated seals may be seen in part as a result of the quest for self-authentication.
Yuming He, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
“Books and Barbarians in Ming China and Beyond”
From the 15th to 18th centuries, one particular genre of woodblock publication in China—pictorial accounts of foreign countries and peoples—was particularly popular. These publications not only enjoyed an enthusiastic Chinese readership, but also circulated in book markets that were trans-regional, and at times even global, in scope. The producers and consumers of these pictorials included emperors, princes, and diplomats, as well as local officials, literati, commoners, commercial publishers, and professional woodblock illustrators. This study attempts to recover some of the lost history of this publishing genre, and to explore its broader significance in the heyday of mass production of woodblock texts that took place from the late 16th to early 17th centuries.
Oliver Moore, Lecturer, Chinese Art History, Leiden University
“Graphic Inventions and New Visions: The early history of photography in China"
This contribution to a workshop on new media in China explores the significance of photography during the first sixty years of its practice in China, ca. 1840-1900, looking at three related themes of history, epistemology and vision. It will consider China as yet another locus for a new technological and social project that provincializes the most commonly rehearsed—and hitherto privileged—accounts of photography’s history in certain parts of Europe and north America. The history of photography proposed here will consider the medium in China not only as a (foreign) introduction but as an (indigenous) invention. To argue the notion of invention, the second part of the paper turns to the earliest 19th-century Chinese discourse that employed Chinese epistemes and experience to define photography as the outcome of long-observed optical principles and a knowledge of chemistry organized quite differently from this branch of science in the West. Finally, considering photography (before the ascent of digital photography) as an intercrossing of optics, chemistry and language, Part 3 addresses various expressions of language that mediated what photography was, most especially in terms of its distinct contributions to vision, its rupture and consonance with antecedent forms of visuality, and its addition to the 19th-century’s broadening range of reprographic media. This last task will lead the discussion back to history and the conclusion that photography, although an increasingly universal medium throughout the 19th century, gave rise in China to form and content whose social and representational significance can only be understood within China’s local economy of visual media.
Hajime Nakatani, Assistant Professor, Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University
“The Unwieldy Hand of Early Chinese Calligraphy”
Loulan manuscript, Ethnography Museum, Sweden
Historians of Chinese calligraphy usually trace the beginning of the art back to the century or two following the collapse of the Han dynasty, when the post-imperial aristocrats, propelled by their heightened aesthetic sensibility, began to explore the artistic possibilities offered by paper--a more delicate and responsive surface of inscription than either silk or bamboo and wood strips. A reexamination of the available data, however, suggests a more heterogeneous and fragmented scriptural environment than such a teleological narrative of aesthetic coming-of-age would allow. In my presentation, I hope to trace the broad outlines of this early medieval “ecology” of writing, one whose failure to establish an orthodox style of inscription was compounded by the virtual absence of orthography and the proliferation of curious decorative styles of writing that calligraphy as we know it would be hard-pressed to accommodate.
Christopher A. Reed, Associate Professor, History, Ohio State University
“China's Gutenberg Revolution: Its Place in China's Modern National Narrative”
China Printing Museum, Beijing
In 1996, the China Printing Museum opened in suburban Beijing. More recently, the Zhang Yimou-scripted opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics included a dramatization of China’s invention of movable type. Why are the Chinese apparently so keen to inform the world about their contributions to printing and publishing technology? This short talk will look at China’s late-Qing and Republican Gutenberg revolution in order to suggest that part of China’s modern self-narrative can be traced to a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western “progress ideology” in which Johann Gutenberg and moveable-type printing played prominent roles. Although Gutenberg is no longer central to the Western self-narrative (suggesting why many non-Chinese, ignorant of the roles that key technologies such as printing have played in various national narratives, misunderstood the Chinese types to be mahjong tiles!), technological revolutions are important to Chinese, suggesting why China’s national elites both before and after 1949 have felt compelled to create a Chinese version of the Gutenberg narrative.
