2015 and Earlier: Past Kim-Renaud East Asian Humanities Lecture Series
2015
Making of the Korean Honorific System
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Speaker: Young-Key Kim-Renaud, Professor of Korean Language and Culture, George Washington University
Korean is a typologically unusual “honorific” language. This lecture focuses on some universal politeness strategies that have shaped various honorific markings and continue to affect the Korean linguistic protocol (LP), which is governed by the social norm. Of particular interest are “panmal,” literally meaning ‘half speech,’ gendered language use, and “overdosing” of the subject-honorific form, all manifesting language change in progress.
Fashioned Exposure: Empress Dowager Cixi's (1835-1908) Photographic Portraits
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Speaker: Ying-Chen Peng, Assistant Professor, Department of Art, American University
This talk analyzes how Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) utilized photography to produce images for different purposes. While Cixi created a formal image for the foreign public, she also projected a provocative personal celebration of female agency in the photographs intended for informal purposes. Regardless of photography’s novel properties, both types of images linger between tradition and innovation. On the one hand, Cixi’s formal photo portraits rigorously adopt the visual language of traditional imperial portraiture to ensure the sitter’s transformation from a single individual to the embodiment of an empire. On the other hand, Cixi appropriated negatively perceived poses in beauty painting, such as looking into a mirror and crossing her legs, to emphasize the power generated from feminine beauty and fecundity. Her appropriation was not to extend the painting’s original meaning but to facilitate a purposeful subversion.
Every Rock A Universe: The Yellow Mountains and Travel Writing in China
Friday, March 6, 2015
Speaker: Jonathan Chaves, Professor of Chinese, George Washington University
Poetry and prose inspired by visits to beautiful places, especially the mountains, constitute an important branch of Chinese literature. Jonathan Chaves recently published the first translation into a Western language of Huangshan lingyaolu 黄山領要錄 , "Comprehending the Essentials of the Yellow Mountains," written by Wang Hongdu 汪洪度.--a painter, calligrapher, poet and prose writer--in 1696, during the "Golden Age" of the Yellow Mountains and the art and literature they inspired. In this talk, Prof. Chaves will discuss his research, including his visit to the Yellow Mountains in the company of great landscape photographer, Wang Wusheng, and will show images of the Mountains. He will also read from the original text, and from his translations, of Wang Hongdu's work.
2014
Author Event with Nakamura Fuminori
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
A reading and discussion with the acclaimed Japanese author upon the release of the English translation of his latest work, Last Winter, We Parted, the Winner of the 2014 David L. Goodis Award for Noir Fiction
In Last Winter We Parted (Soho Crime | October, 21st, 2014) a young writer arrives at a prison to interview a convict.
The writer has been commissioned to write a full account of the case, from its bizarre and grisly details to the nature of the man behind the crime. The suspect, a world-renowned photographer named Kiharazaka, has a deeply unsettling portfolio—lurking beneath the surface of each photograph is an acutely obsessive fascination with his subject. He stands accused of murdering two women—both burned alive—and will likely face the death penalty. But something isn't quite right, and as the young writer probes further, his doubts about this man as a killer intensify ... Evoking Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “Hell Screen” and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Nakamura has crafted a chilling novel that asks a deceptively sinister question: Is it possible to truly capture the essence of another human being? [From Soho Press, NY.]
Moonlight and Golden Clouds: Silver and Gold in the Arts of Japan
Friday, April 25, 2014
Speaker: Ann Yonemura, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Since the nineteenth century, studies of the arts of Japan have often isolated the crafts, treating them as separable from the mainstream of art history and as minor vehicles of aesthetic ideas. Lacquerware, especially maki-‐e, with its sumptuous designs in gold and silver, is often considered as merely “decorative,” rather than as a primary carrier of aesthetic and cultural values, ideas, and meaning.
Some styles of Japanese painting have been similarly described as “decorative,” a term that has in recent times tended to trivialize the functions and significance of gold, silver, and the adornment of objects and images in the contexts for which they were designed, made, and used. A hallmark of the Japanese visual arts from the eighth century onward is prevalence of gold and silver not only as adornment, but as a fundamental component of pictorial representation across media. Artists developed an unmatched range of techniques for creating subtle images in gold and silver that imbued their work with the luminosity of reflected light. This paper examines the technical, aesthetic, and cultural significance of gold and silver in Japanese art and argues for an integrative approach to research of the aesthetic history of Japan.
Asia in the Making of the New World
Friday, Jan. 31, 2014
Speaker: Prof. Chi-ming Yang, University of Pennsylvania
How did the Asian luxury trade shape new representations of race in Europe and the Americas? By the mid-1600s, the demand for Chinese and Japanese luxury goods was shaping Western tastes across the Atlantic world, and the drive to replicate these commodities spurred numerous innovations in the arts and sciences, in particular, techniques for coloring and coating surfaces. The marvelous, glossy veneers of China trade porcelain and lacquer also provided new media for portraying indigenous peoples of the Americas. Fantastical chinoiserie designs often juxtaposed ethnographic details from travel accounts ranging from Florida to Brazil, rendering consumable the very idea of the global and aestheticizing the violence endemic to long-distance trade. How were bodies racialized through their association with Eastern luxury goods? How did Asian decorative art and ornament feed emerging discourses of slavery, complexion, and racial difference? By tracking the circulation of images of native peoples, plants, and animals between and across different media, we can better understand how an eighteenth-century aesthetics of race relied upon new technologies of representing and understanding a globalized world.
2013
Studying Abroad: The Ivy League Dream and Chinese Modernity
Friday, November 15, 2013
Speaker: Andy Chih-Ming Wang, Associate Researcher, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, currently a visiting scholar in the English Department.
In 1854 Yung Wing, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, returned to a poverty-stricken China, where domestic revolt and foreign invasion were shaking the Chinese empire. Since then, generations of students from China—and other Asian countries—have embarked on this transpacific voyage in search of modernity. What forces have shaped Chinese students' migration to the U.S.? What impact do they have on the formation of Asian America? In particular, what does study abroad mean in the context of the globalization of education? Based on Dr. Wang’s new book, the talk opens up discussion about Chinese parents' and students' obsession with the Ivy League schools. Study abroad in the West has always been a project of neoliberal subject formation. By examining the lives and voices of these scholars, we can understand how becoming Asian American has become both the lure and the burden of Chinese modernity and intellectual independence.
Bio: Andy Wang is Associate Researcher in the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. His articles appeared in major leading journals, including positions: Asia critique, American Quarterly and Cultural Studies. Andy Wang’s first book, Transpacific Articulations: Study Abroad and the Remaking of Asian America was recently published by the University of Hawai'i Press (2013).
Inaugural lecture: The languages of East Asia: What does it mean to be East Asian?
Friday, October 18, 2013
Speaker: S. Robert Ramsey of the University of Maryland
East Asia is not a geographical area—at least for those of us who spend our lives studying it. Rather, “East Asia” is the shorthand term we use in talking about one the world’s great civilizations. In a word, it’s primarily a cultural term for us, not a geographical one, and in that sense East Asian Studies is not area studies at all. It’s about the history and deeper significance of human culture and institutions.
And yet, geography, the lay of the land, is nevertheless an important topic for the East Asianist, because it has shaped the languages and cultures of East Asia to a remarkable degree. How that happened is a topic I plan to explore, at least in a general way, in my talk.
Bio: Robert Ramsey is Professor of East Asian linguistics at the University of Maryland and immediate past chair of the Department of Asian and East European Languages and Cultures. Ramsey’s geographic focus encompasses Japan, China, Korea, and East Asia. He is best known for his work on Korean dialects and the reconstruction of prehistoric stages of Korean.