Photography and East Asian Art
Chicago: Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, and Art Media Resources, Inc., 2021. Hardcover with Dust Jacket, 424 pages. Item #45928
ISBN: 9781588861597
Richly illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs of historical figures, texts, famous sites and masterworks, this volume examines photography’s profound impact on East Asian art and visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Inspired by the “Photography and the Art of East Asia” symposium held at the University of Chicago in May 2015, co-editors Wu Hung and Chelsea Foxwell have compiled these scholarly studies into a new book that deepens understanding of this important field of study. The essays reexamine existing ideas about photography’s relationship with art history and provide fresh perspectives and newly discovered information. Photographic reproductions of works of art and architecture resulted in the canonization of famous masterworks and stimulated the growth of the art market, and photography became an art medium in itself. Photographic representations of architecture and the built environment featured private gardens as well as the changing geopolitical meaning of the Beijing cityscape. Portrait photography acquired widespread popularity and heightened importance in many spheres of social, personal, and commercial life. Photography’s importance in different kinds of mass media burgeoned with the emergence of modern technologies of photographic journalism, shaping public opinion and political ideologies.
“Photography and Art History,” the first section in the book, offers five original studies of key episodes in Japanese and Chinese art, challenging existing ideas about photography’s relationship with art history while providing newly discovered information. The second section, “Photography and Portraiture,” is devoted to portraiture, which acquired heightened importance in all spheres of social life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to the invention and popularity of photography. The third section, “Photography and Architecture,” centers on photographic representations of architecture and the built environment, exemplified by a group of private gardens and the cityscape of Beijing. The final section, “Photography and Mass Media,” explores photography’s relationship with different kinds of newspapers and magazines from alternative perspectives.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction by Wu Hung
I. PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART HISTORY
1. Utsushi (Transcribing) and Photography: Imaging Art and Antiquities in Nineteenth-Century Japan
by Chelsea Foxwell
2. Did Photography Win the Contest of Picturing Epigraphic Bronze?
by Yanfei Zhu
3. A Photo That Changed History: Researching Old Photographs of the Binyang Central Cave at Longmen
by Jiao Lin
4. A Proprietor’s Instinct: Sculptural Gestures, Decisive Clichés, and Segalen’s Wild Beasts of Liang
by Catherine Stuer
5. Shashin Geijutsu: Making “Photographic Art” Modern
by Karen M. Fraser
II. PHOTOGRAPHY AND PORTRAITURE
6. Photography, Love, and the Afterlife in East Asia
by Jeehey Kim
7. The Inscribed Studio Portrait as “I-Portrait”: Photographing a New Self in Early Twentieth-Century China
Wu Hung
8. The Devil Is in the Details: A Study of the Costume of Chinese Officials in Nineteenth-Century Photographs
Daisy Yiyou Wang
9. Who Is the Real Hero?: Seeing Doubles in Lang Jingshan’s “Portraits” of Zhang Daqian
by Mia Yinxing Liu
10. “I Married a Photograph”: The Still Image Transfigured in Dazhaimen (The Grand Mansion Gate)
by Judith Zeitlin
III. PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHITECTURE
11. Prince Yihuan and the Photographer Liang Shitai’s Photo Album as a “Garden in the Mind”
by Tingting Xu
12. Collectable Artifacts: The Former Capital (Beiping) of the 1930s in Photographs
by Wei-Cheng Lin
IV. PHOTOGRAPHY AND MASS MEDIA
13. Photographic Advertising in Meiji Japan’s Department-Store Magazines and the Commodification of Elite Culture
by Julia Sapin
14. 新闻与宣传之间: 以《民立报》宋教仁遗体肖像为例
Between News and Propaganda: The Case of Song Jiaoren’s Posthumous Portraits in Minli Newspaper
by Gu Zheng 顾铮
15. 写真：新记《大公报》中的摄影与绘画（1926—1937）
Depicting the Real: Photography and Painting in the Dagong Daily (1926-1937)
by Sheng Wei 盛葳
16. Visualizing War-Time China: Case Studies of the Photojournalists Shen Yiqian and Sha Fei
by Kuiyi Shen
Afterword by Chelsea Foxwell
Index
About the Editors and Contributing Authors.
Price: $75.00