Browsing by Author "Abe, Stanley K"
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Item Embargo Chinese Women Artists and New Manifestations of Guanyin, 1550–1750(2023) Yoon, SoohyunThis dissertation examines the ways in which Chinese women artists in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties (1550–1750) used “Thirty-Two Manifestations of Bodhisattva Guanyin” as a model to create new artworks. “Thirty-Two Manifestations of Bodhisattva Guanyin” is a set of pictorial depictions and eulogies for the important Buddhist deity Guanyin, whose feminine appearance and salvific power garnered a great cult among female Buddhists in pre-modern China. I argue that, by copying, appropriating, and transforming this set to create novel works of paintings and embroideries, Chinese women artists from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century demonstrated their increased artistic agency as well as their deep engagement with the religious visual culture of the time. Four artistic mediums are studied for the investigation of “Thirty-Two Manifestations of Bodhisattva Guanyin” and women’s exploration of this theme: rubbing, painting, woodblock print, and embroidery. Chapter One studies the rubbing version of the “Thirty-Two Manifestations of Bodhisattva Guanyin” to illustrate its characteristic as a catalog of feminine iconography of Guanyin, compiled in the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). Chapter Two examines the painted albums of the “Thirty-Two Manifestations of Bodhisattva Guanyin,” executed by female painters for female patrons, to prove that the set was a crucial part of the visual culture of the lay Buddhist women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serving as the ideal subject of artistic appropriations. Chapter Three discusses the woodblock print volumes of “Thirty-Two Manifestations of Bodhisattva Guanyin” and how they made the popular iconography of Guanyin available for women readers as potential embroidery patterns. Lastly, Chapter Four surveys the embroidered versions of the Guanyin images from the “Thirty-Two Manifestations of Bodhisattva Guanyin,” which shows the greatest degree of the transformation from models, to bring focus to Chinese women’s artistic agency in the medium symbolic of feminine virtue. The artworks studied in this dissertation will demonstrate that for women artists exploring the theme of Guanyin, making references to the pre-existing imagery did not always equate to honoring the past. Instead, the works bear witness to the women artists’ adaptability to the demands and preferences of the general Buddhist audience, highlighting how paintings, prints, and embroideries coexisted to create a dynamic culture in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties.
Item Open Access Recoding Capital: Socialist Realism and Maoist Images (1949-1976)(2014) Lee, Young Ji VictoriaThis dissertation examines the visual production of capital in socialist realist images during the Maoist era (1949-1976). By deconstructing the pseudo-opposition between capitalism and socialism, my research demonstrates that, although the country was subject to the unchallenged rules of capital and its accumulation in both domestic and international spheres, Maoist visual culture was intended to veil China's state capitalism and construct its socialist persona. This historical analysis illustrates the ways in which the Maoist regime recoded and resolved the versatile contradictions of capital in an imaginary socialist utopia. Under these conditions, a wide spectrum of Maoist images played a key role in shaping the public perception of socialism as a reality in everyday lives. Here the aesthetic protocols of socialist realism functioned to create for the imagined socialist world a new currency that converted economic values, which followed the universal laws of capital, into the fetish of socialism. Such a collective "cognitive mapping" in Fredric Jameson's words - which situated people in the non-capitalist, socialist world and inserted them into the flow of socialist time - rendered imperceptible a mutated capitalism on the terrain of the People's Republic of China under Mao. This research aims to build a conversation between the real, material space subordinated to the laws of capital and the visual production of imaginary capital in the landscapes of socialist realism, for the purpose of mapping out how uneven geographical development contributed to activating, dispersing, and intensifying the global movement of Soviet and Chinese capital in the cultural form of socialist realism. This study also illustrates how, via the image-making process, socialist realist and Maoist images influenced by Mao's romantic vision of the countryside were meant to neutralize this uneven development in China and mask its on-going internal colonialism. Through this analysis, I argue that, in the interesting juncture where art for art's sake and art for politics intersected, Maoist visual culture ended up reproducing the hegemony of capital as a means of creating national wealth.
Item Open Access Shaping Religious and Cultural Aspiration: Engraved Sutras in Southwestern Shandong Province from the Northern Qi Dynasty (550-577 CE), China(2016) Ha, JungminThis dissertation explores how the Buddhist texts carved on the cliffs of mountains served their patrons’ religious and cultural goals. During the Northern Qi period (550-577 CE), these carved Buddhist sutra texts and Buddha names were prevalent, and were carved directly onto the surfaces of numerous mountains in southwestern Shandong Province. The special focus of this study is on the Buddhist engravings at Mt. Hongding in Dongping, and at Mt. Tie in Zoucheng. Created in approximately 553-564 CE, the carvings at Mt. Hongding stand as the terminus a quo of the history of Buddhist sutras carved into the rocks of the Shandong mountains. The Buddhist carvings at Mt. Hongding served monastic goals. The monk patrons, Seng’an Daoyi, Fahong, and others created the carvings as an integral part of their Buddhist meditation practices. The carvings at Mt. Tie paint a very different picture. At Mt. Tie, a colossal Buddhist sculpture-style carving was created in 579 CE. Sponsored by several Han Chinese patrons, the carving was designed in the form of a gigantic Chinese traditional stele. This study suggests that several Han Chinese local elites proudly displayed their Han Chinese linage by using the gigantic stele form of Buddhist text carving as a means to proclaim Han Chinese cultural and artistic magnificence. To achieve these non-religious goals, they appropriated rhetorical devices often used by the Han elite, such as the stele form, written statements about the excellence of the calligraphy used, and discourse on calligraphy connoisseurship.
Item Open Access The Fantastic Theater of Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century(2022) Tang, Kelly ChinThe literati stereotype of Modern Chinese Art began as a conservative adaption of Chinese nationalist reform during the early twentieth century. Modern stereotypes provided an intuitive, common-sense way of acting and negotiating the complexities of difference. The Fantastic Theater of Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century chronicles an alternate history of Chinese émigrés’ embrace of the stereotypical image of literati culture. That stereotype was a modern form of visibility and recognition of Chinese identity. From China to diverse Western locales—Geneva, London, France, New York, and California—the literati stereotype reconciled the dual undesirable conditions of Westerners’ absent understanding and negative misunderstanding of China. The stereotype was a positive compromise of optics, expectations, and self-presentation.The visual archive of the literati stereotype examines literati scholars and their associations with learning, philosophy, and ink painting. Sculpture, books, design, advertising, ceramics, photography, architecture, and personal ephemera allow me to assemble a new approach to the artists Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), Lang Jingshan (1892-1995), Zhang Shuqi (1900-1957), Yu Jingzhi (1900-1980), and Wang Jiyuan (1893-1975), to write a different history of the Bollingen Foundation, the lives of the Chew Family and their China Art Center in Carmel, and Mai-mai Sze, the little-known translator of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting.