[Workshop] "Impossible Purities: Modern East Asian Art and the Question of Artistic Medium" at University of Chicago

Impossible Purities:
Modern East Asian Art and the Question of Artistic Medium

Workshop at the University of Chicago, Saturday, April 28, 2012
Rooms 152 and 157, Department of Art History, 5540 S. Greenwood Ave.

Organized by the Center for the Art of East Asia, Department of Art
History, University of Chicago
with additional support from the Committee on Japanese Studies,
University of Chicago

Free and open to the public.

9:00 AM-12:30 PM; 5:00 PM-8:00 PM

Conceptions of medium have long shaped the presumptive fields of
modern and contemporary art, but particularly with regard to modern and
contemporary art in East Asia. In many respects, the very history of this
field might be configured in the lines drawn between oil and ink,
figuration and abstraction, and "fine" art and craft. Many of these
divisions were enacted to work through evolving definitions of culture,
nationality, ethnicity, and race throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Particular media were celebrated for their supposed capacity to
authentically, or "purely" embody the sensibilities of a particular nation,
culture, or race. This was often in direct odds with the artworks
themselves, which were the result of sustained negotiations with diverse,
and frequently, divergent, ways of thinking about form.

This workshop aims to open up discussion regarding medium in modern
and contemporary art in East Asia.
Presenters will cover a wide range of case studies, including export
painting in 19th century southern China, the mixing of oil and ink
painting in Meiji Japan, and the engagement with materiality by ink
painters working in postwar Korea.

Workshop Participants:  Jerome Silbergeld (Princeton University), ""Is a
White Horse a Horse? Is A Painted Pot a Pot or a Painting? The Long
History of Mixed-Media, Mixed-Genre Arts in China"

Winnie Wong (Harvard University), "Lam Qua's Ingres's <Odalisque>:
Non-Authorship and Pure Modes of Copying"

Chelsea Foxwell (University of Chicago), "A Place to Come Back To:
Nihonga's Narratives of Reenactment"

John Szostak (University of Hawai’i at Manoa), "Nihonga and the "Pigment
Problem": Evolving Notions of Mineral Pigments in Modern Japanese
Painting"

Bert Winther-Tamaki (University of California at Irvine), "Fluxed by Other
Media: The Modern Flow of Asian Ink"

Joan Kee (University of Michigan), "Kwon Young-woo Stands His Ground:
Abstract Ink Painting in Postwar Korea"

Workshop Discussants: Kevin Chua (Texas Tech School of Art) and Wu
Hung  (University of Chicago)

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*Offered in Conjunction*: Two talks at the Art Institute of Chicago by
Jerome Silbergeld:

*Thursday, 4/26, 6-7pm, Fullerton Hall, AIC (free with admission;
students free with ID)* All Receding Together, One Hundred Slanting Lines
—Replication and  Variation in Chinese Paintings of Architecture

*Saturday, 4/28, 2pm, Price Auditorium, AIC (free with admission) * China
Seen by the Chinese: The Emergence of Documentary Photography as a
Fine Art in China, 1951-2003