PICTURING SCIENCE IN MODERN CHINA

The ink brushes of modern painters were employed as tools of the nation in early twentieth-century China. Yet the expression of a radical idealism about the new republic in their ink paintings was tempered early on by a tentative and self-conscious exploration of new ways of seeing. By synthesizing a "universal" scientific gaze with their idiosyncratically trained vision as artists, they created practices of seeing that were connective, ductile, and boundary-crossing, moving across and dwelling within diverse ecologies of material knowledge, whether European sciences, Japanese museums, or connoisseurship of Song-dynasty scrolls. The artists also were attentive to the biophysical world, open to improvisation and alive to the work of pictures as mediators between language and living form. This seminar will explore their pursuit of knowledge in movement, asking "what do we know when we see?" Students will co-curate a digital exhibition about intersections of science and the arts and learn how to write exhibition labels and catalogue essays.

Students will learn how to:
1) identify and refine questions to be posed in an exhibition;
2) display objects as a visual narrative;
3) write in the prose style of museum labels;
4) learn about copyright and image publication permissions.

Because teaching is a form of learning and in effect, a form of research, I will offer extracurricular workshops for the graduate students in the course on teaching and mentoring the advanced undergraduates in the seminar. The digital exhibition will be published in the 2018 Winter term at Spectrum, the university’s new undergraduate refereed and interdisciplinary journal for which I am serving as faculty advisor. Students will work with a GRA designer to develop the look of the website interface, and will work with a GRA managing editor who also will liase with the Spectrum editorial board. A symposium about the exhibition research and the process of curating itself will take place when the exhibition goes live in the late winter.

SEMINAR MEETS ON THURSDAYS 2:00-4:50

Email Lisa Claypool

To email the GRAS who will be working with you on thie curatorial project, click on their names:

Daniel Walker

Anran Tu