HADVC 411.511 | Picturing Science in Modern China | Fall 2017

In your role of presenter, please say a few words about your exploratory (and remember to put your picture on the blog along with your exploratory so that we can look at it again). You don't need to go into depth because all of us will have read your exploratory.

In your role as discussant, prepare 1-2 comments about what you like about the exploratory, and then raise a question about it. The question could be directed towards an idea presented in the exploratory which might be further developed, or a reflection you have yourself about directions to develop the exploratory writer's train of thought.

----------------- further reading on curating ------------------
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week seven / oct 19 / interior vision
discussion facilitators: Banefsheh and Justine

• Janice L. Neri, "Cultivating Interiors: Philadelphia, China, and the Natural World," in Knowing Nature, ed. Amy Meyers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 180-209. (PDF)
• Yeewan Koon, A Defiant Brush: Su Renshan and the Politics of Painting in Early 19th-century Guangzhou (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2014), chapter 1 (PDF)
• small group discussion of themes that emerged from last week's exploratories; possible meeting with website designer at 5:00 pm.

Images:
Trade objects browse the MIT Visualizing Cultures image database

Natural History Museum, London, Reeves Collection (search the Library and Archives databases for pictures)

----------------- further reading on plants & flowers ------------------
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week eight / oct 26 / feeling seeing
discussion facilitators: Anran and Liuba

• Jennifer Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), "Audubon's Burden: Materiality and Transmission in The Birds of America" pp. 69-115. (PDF)
• Aida Wong, The Other Kang Youwei (Leiden: Brill, 2016), chapter 5. (PDF)
• blog 5.0 each person in each team post up to 3 objects you might like to see in your subsection of the exhibition; you will look at these together and decide over the course of the coming weeks which ones to include (6-7 maximum, 3 per undergraduate; 1 or more per graduate student). Discuss how these objects answer the question driving your exhibition or provide food for thought on your exhibition theme.
• please note: undergraduates may choose to read the text of your choice.

Images:
(To compare): "In Fine Feather: Birds, Art and Science," Toledo Art Museum exhibition catalogue

John J. Audubon's Birds of America

----------------- further reading on bird science ------------------
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week nine / nov 2 / beauty
discussion facilitators: Christina, Shirly, and Daniel

• Alexander Nemerov, "The Rattlesnake: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Place of Art in America," in Knowing Nature, ed. Amy Meyers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 226-253. (PDF)
• blog 6.0 each person post ONE object that you have decided to display in your exhibition; discuss labels in class and learn from your graduate mentor how to write a label
  

----------------- further reading on animals ------------------
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week ten / nov 9 / seeing the invisible
Fieldtrip to entomological museum, Strickland Museum is in Rm CW-223 of the Biological Sciences Building at the beginning of the session
discussion facilitators: Chelsea, Julie, and Anran

• Claypool, Lisa. "Beggars, Black Bears, and Butterflies: The Scientific Gaze and Ink Painting in Modern China" read section on Gao Jianfu
• Janice Neri, "Stitches, Specimens and Pictures: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Processing of the Natural World," in The Insect and the Image (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 139-180. (for PDF click here) read pp.139-158 and the section "Processing Nature in the New World," pp. 166-174.
• workshop in which undergrads select two additional objects, bringing total to three, and review basics of object labels together.

Images:

See the online exhibition in the same issue of Cross-Currents as the article linked above (it is entitled "Picturing Science in Modern China")

For pictures of insects by Maria Sibylla Merian, see exhibition curated at Dumbarton Oaks.

----------------- further reading on bodies ------------------
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week eleven / READING WEEK

week twelve / nov 23 / cartographic vision
Second trip to the Mactaggart Collection
discussion facilitators: Wang Yue, Connor, and Kourtney

• Cordell Yee, "Cartography in China: Cartography and the Visual Arts," Cartography in Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, eds. Woodward and Harley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), vol 2, bk 2: 139-147. (PDF)
• Hongxing Zhang, "Studies in Late Qing Dynasty Battle Paintings." Artibus Asiae 60, no. 2 (2000): 265-296. (JSTOR)
• blog 7.0 post draft labels for the objects in your exhibition

Images:

Map of the Nian rebellion, dated to 1858-1860. University of Cambridge.

----------------- further reading on geography and cartography ------------------
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weeks thirteen-fourteen / nov 30 & dec 7 / your enchanted and scientific gaze on modern china
First symposium: Curatorial project and research statement presentations and workshopping
Second symposium : Curatorial project and research statement presentations and workshopping

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if there were a week 15, we would take up these readings:

• Jun Lei, "Producing Norms, Defining Beauty: The Role of Science in the Regulation of the Female Body and Sexuality in Liangyou and Furen Huabao," Liangyou--Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis (electronic access)
• Michel Foucault, "Utopian body" ("Le corps utopique"), tr. Lucia Allais, et. al., in Sensorium: Embodied experience, technology and contemporary art, ed. Caroline Jones (Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 2005), 230-233. (PDF)

Images:
Liangyou [The Young Companion]. Rutherford Library. UA AP 95 C4 L33 folio