Author Archives: tp86kuta

“Comfort Women” in Taiwan

Issues of Discursivity, Intertextuality, and Filmic Representation
Wednesday
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
Room 6

  • Agnes Schick-Chen, “The Interdiscursivity of ‘Comfort Women’ Memoryscape in Taiwan”
  • Shu-Hua Kang, “Storytelling as Resistance: Towards a Humanist Discourse for Taiwanese Comfort Women”
  • Chris Berry, “Situating ‘Song of the Reed:’ Documentary Ethics and the ‘Comfort Women’ Genre”
  • Astrid Lipinsky, “Filmic Representation of So-called ‘Comfort Women’: Changes and Developments in Taiwan and China”

The ways in which the historical experience of so-called “comfort stations” for WWII Japanese military personnel in several parts of East- and South-East Asia, was dealt with in different post-war societies, depended on the social, political, and cultural developments of the respective countries and regions. Questions of how the memories of those who had been conscripted and misused as sexual slaves in their youth have been broached in Taiwan after democratisation are addressed in this panel.
Kang Shu-Hua introduces activist initiatives such as a museum, workshops, and documentary films, aimed at a new understanding of the fate of “comfort women” by transcending the victim paradigm and repudiating earlier political interpretations. The film Song of the Reed of 2015 she sees as one significant contribution to what she identifies as a new humanist discourse on comfort women in Taiwan, is further discussed by Chris Berry who places it in the context of a growing number of international comfort women films and highlights some of the ethical aspects of their making and reception. Comparing Song of the Reed to an earlier Taiwanese documentary, A Secret Burried for 50 Years (1998), and the mainland documentary Twenty Two, Astrid Lipinsky looks at filmic representation of “comfort women” from a gender perspective. Finally, Agnes Schick-Chen maps other discursive formations configuring the space in which Taiwanese discourse(s) on “comfort women” has(have) evolved and developed in recent years.

Agnes Schick-Chen, “The Interdiscursivity of ‘Comfort Women’ Memoryscape in Taiwan”

Following up on previous research pointing to the impact of rights and gender discourses on the retrospective treatment of the Japanese WWII ‘comfort station system’, this presentation approaches the problem of a limited memory-scape of ‘comfort women’ in Taiwan from the perspective of interdiscursivity. It argues that whereas initiatives such as a comfort women museum or monument may be read as belated attempts to open up public space to the commemoration of those victimised, related accounts and commentaries still illustrate the difficulty of framing this aspect of Taiwan’s war-time history within the discursive foundations of Taiwan’s post-martial law development. After the end of martial law in 1987, the opening up and re-structuring of discursive space allowed for the (re-)introduction and re-configuration of topics that had been suppressed and/or constrained by authoritarian rule. This led to a situation in which debates on gender equality, human rights, and post-coloniality were gaining momentum, and issues of coming to terms with past traumata were finally addressed by political and social actors. In order to answer the question of why, in spite of this seemingly conducive discursive constellation, it was still so difficult to re-narrate and re-establish the fate of ‘comfort women’ as individual cases of infringements against women’s rights in the colonial past, is targeted by looking at how the above named related discourses interact and interfere with each other in ways that set the parameters of constituting the discursive memoryscape of comfort women in Taiwan.

Shu-Hua Kang, “Storytelling as Resistance: Towards a Humanist Discourse for Taiwanese Comfort Women”

Gaining public support for issues that comfort women face has always been a challenge in Taiwan because of the complex sociopolitical contexts that impede full recognition of their suffering. This study discusses how activists in Taiwan who worked closely with comfort women initiated a humanist discourse that emphasises humanistic characteristics of comfort women survivors and resistance to the collective image constructed by the dominant discourses. The activists presented human characteristics and life stories of comfort women using arts-based social activism, such as photography, documentaries, and museum exhibitions that transcend the traditional image of comfort women as victims of Japanese atrocities in World War II, and instead, enabled people to view them as they would their grandmothers. In this study, we first discuss the issues of the Taiwanese comfort women that emerged in the 1990s and review the transnational redress movement using the competing discourses of nationalism and women’s rights. We then discuss the process of developing a humanist discourse from survivors’ acts of storytelling that re-positions comfort women within Taiwanese society and reconnects the memories of comfort women as ordinary human beings with the public through arts-based social activism. Finally, we assess the weaknesses and strengths of the humanist discourse. This study also serves as a self-reflection of the author’s practical experiences to offer new perspectives on the comfort women redress movement and professional inspirations concerning other social movements.

Chris Berry, “Situating Song of the Reed: Documentary Ethics and the “Comfort Women” Genre”

Song of the Reed (蘆葦之歌, 2015) is a Taiwanese documentary film directed by Wu Hsiu-Ching (吳秀菁) and completed in 2014. It marks the Chinese-language world’s growing participation in the spread of films about the former sex slaves of the Japanese imperial army referred to as “comfort women.” How should we understand this film? This paper argues that placing Song of the Reed in an intertextual and transnational genealogy of so-called “comfort women” films can illuminate its ethical contribution to the depiction of the survivors. It traces the proliferation of fiction and documentary films about the so-called “comfort women.” From the long absence of such films and the initial representations in the form of prostitution melodramas, the paper argues that ethics has become an ever-greater concern in the design and reception of these films, and especially documentary films. It locates a tension between two overlapping aims—the push for political recognition of the “comfort women” and the concern for their well-being —and locates Song of the Reed as an effort to maximise the therapeutic benefit of the filmmaking process itself.

Astrid Lipinsky, “Filmic Representation of so-called ‘Comfort Women’: Changes and Developments in Taiwan and China”

Taiwan has established a legacy of ‘comfort women’ documentaries with A Secret buried for 50 Years in 1998, that was continued and further developed by the release of Song of the Reed in 2015. Both documentaries are directed by women and focus on the same group of former so-called ‘comfort women’, so the second film was able to rely on the basic knowledge established by the first and attempt to proceed in a different direction. The two documentaries have been inspired, financed and made possible by the Taiwanese Women’s Rescue Foundation, a women’s NGO. Without NGO support, neither the number of Taiwanese survivors willing to be filmed nor the importance given to this issue by politics and society would have allowed for the making of a film—or even two films. The problem of financing a film on ‘comfort women’ also became obvious to mainland Chinese director Guo Ke. As it took him years to assemble the necessary crowdfunding, he contrasts the slowness of funding sources with the speed of former ‘comfort women’ passing away. By comparing the Taiwanese female directors’ films with the one made by male mainland director Guo Ke, the paper raises the following question:  How far were the directors’ approaches related to their gender? And has Song of the Reed introduced a new generation of ‘comfort women’ documentary to Taiwan that is not visible (yet) in the People’s Republic of China?

Gender, Stigma, and Melancholia in Sinophone Cultural Representations

Wednesday
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Room 6

  • Organised by Wen-chi Li
  • Andrea Riemenschnitter, Chair
  • Wen-chi Li, “More than Shame: Constructing Melancholia in the Poems of Chen Ke-hua”
  • Helen Hess, “Querying Gender Roles in Singaporean and Malaysian Literature and Art”
  • Sujie Jin, “Fantasising About a Different Gender Identity in Boys’ Love Fiction”
  • Andrea Riemenschnitter, Discussant

The panel is organised in a multiscalar framework that takes into account intersecting categories such as gender, race, class, culture, affective intensities, and aesthetic forms to analyse their entanglements with the (trans-)local, socio-political forces, and their particular forms of oppression. Stigma and discrimination against LGBT and other marginalised groups classify the Other in undesirable stereotypes (Goffman) and produce negative affections such as shame, fear, loneliness, and melancholia. Regarding the latter, Kristeva argues that aesthetic and literary creation triggered by melancholia can set forth an artistic work that represents the subject’s coming to terms with the collapse of the symbolic. Indebted to her intervention, this panel will engage in a dialogue with marginalised queer artists. It will in particular study how they and their audiences read these Others within the Sinophone communities, and how their struggles in the battlefields of heteronormativity employ the affective intensity of melancholia in order to produce redemptive social action. We will argue that behaving, writing, or thinking queerly empowers them to escape, challenge, and (theoretically) undo the majorities’ enforcement of male heteronormativity. To provide a comprehensive perspective on how gender, stigma, melancholia and other tropes are operated in Sinophone texts and their communities, the panel cuts across various identities (such as queer, transgender, lesbian, and straight), genres (i.e. photography, poetry, and novel both printed and online), and geographical areas (in particular, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and mainland China).

Wen-chi Li, “More than Shame: Constructing Melancholia in the Poems of Chen Ke-hua”

Taiwan’s LGBT tolerance nowadays has come from continuous struggles against the social conservative. In the 1990s, when gay and lesbian novels and poems were widely published, the writers tended to portray homosexual sex and desire as unspeakable and tabooed, with a strong lyrical tone, and in a counter-rational style that implicitly challenges heteronormativity and patriarchy. Such writings do not merely stage feelings of shame—an affect often connected to gay identity in queer theories—but also are underpinned by melancholia. This presentation intends to offer an alternative perspective on Taiwanese LGBT experiences, particularly that of the gay writer Chen Ke-hua (陳克華, 1961), and exemplify how the poet’s life and oeuvre are connected to melancholia. I will explore how melancholia represented in gay writings is associated with personal experience and social denial, and consider the specific affective dynamics within Taiwan’s identity and gender politics.

Helen Hess, “Querying Gender Roles in Singaporean and Malaysian Literature and Art”

The Merlion is a mythical creature that is commonly believed to represent Singapore’s identity. It has the body of a fish and the head of a lion. In Amanda Lee Koe’s short story Siren, the hybrid animal dwells in a human transsexual protagonist called Marl, who in this way represents a queer version of Singapore’s national allegory. Marl’s classmates claim that he is half lion half fish because he does not fit into their concept of a typical boy. Marl keeps telling himself a tale about a sailor, who fell in love with a siren and brought up a child that is half-human, half mermaid. The appropriation of supernatural figures and mythical creatures often functions as a kind of self-empowerment. When accepted and encrypted with positive meaning, the experience of stigmatisation can be reversed and turned into a powerful defence mechanism. Many of Koe’s stories question the heteronormative gender roles that dominate public discourse, against which some of Koe’s lesbian protagonists do not even dare to raise their voices. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis, postcolonial feminism, and gender theories, the paper intends to analyse how gender and sexuality are represented in Singapore’s and Malaysia’s public discourse from the late colonial era until today. Furthermore, it will study how stereotyped role models are challenged in contemporary Sinophone fiction and artworks. The goal is to explore how power relations and disparity based on discursively constructed identity categories have changed over time, and how cultural representations map out alternative concepts of subjecthood.

Sujie Jin, “Fantasising About a Different Gender Identity in Boys’ Love Fiction“

Chinese online boys’ love (BL) fiction—a genre that features male-male relationships—is a collective product created by and for women since the late 1990s under the influence of Japanese BL culture. The female writers and readers, who are commonly named as fujoshi (funü 腐女 in Mandarin, literally, rotten girls) in a self-deprecating sense, are relatively marginalised socially and have to endure the anxieties of gender essentialism within the cultural patriarchy. To escape from the prevalent gender stereotypes, they construct an ideal, liberal, and utopian community through BL texts. It is significant to investigate fujoshis’ reaction toward the kind of gender identity that is conveyed and fantasised about in BL fiction. Two stories—The Water Buffalo Man 牛男 and Groceries for Pathfinders 南北杂货 written by the female author Baozhihuqiang 报纸糊墙—will be presented in a case study in order to show how fujoshi fictionalise a better life based on the imagination of gay desire and experience in the settings of an imagined contemporary Chinese society or the golden times of the Tang Dynasty. Actively participating in the making of the fantasy, the fujoshi community comments on the text online, thereby affecting the development of the characters and plot. The analysis will thus illustrate how fujoshi challenge the existing female stereotypes as encountered in the real, patriarchal world by building an alternative, digital, and open cultural sphere.

Emotions in China

Youth between Fear and Nostalgia
Wednesday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room 6

  • Organised and Chaired by Sascha Klotzbücher
  • Sascha Klotzbücher, “Politics of Fear and The Memories of The Cultural Revolution: Why Generations Do not Meet in China”
  • Maria Nolan, “Youth, Home, and Urban Alienation in Contemporary China”
  • Lili Jiang, “The Changing Sense of Belonging of Chinese Master Students in Germany”
  • Lisa Richaud, Discussant

This is the third panel that explores the importance of emotions. All three participants focus on the question how emotions of the youth frame perception and action. This panel tries to explore how young people create emotional settings and how this agency is powerful even when material or political representation is gone: The first presenter explores how fear is critical for the emotional manipulation of the Cultural Revolution and even unfolds in transgenerational settings. The second presentation focus on nostalgia of lost homes, and the last presenter on shared affect of lostness and nostalgia in folk rock music.

Sascha Klotzbücher, “Politics of Fear and The Memories of The Cultural Revolution: Why Generations Do not Meet in China”

This paper is part of a recent published book that develops a framework for the analysis of power, emotion, and psychodynamics. I analyse the power of Maoism not in ideological terms but how ordinary people simplified and distorted it as new access to a new Lebenswelt. This paper argues that Maoist ideology created a stable system of “affect manipulation” to exist, enabling authorities to subtly manipulate individuals to perceive themselves in politically defined states of joy and frustration. It is crucial to understand the process of identification in politically designed, unified, and controlled social roles propagated during the Cultural Revolution. Acting in these social roles, they internalise ideology when coping with politically induced anxiety, and ambivalence by enabling and acting out these new designed positive feelings. For this presentation, I will look in a case study. I use autobiographies written by a former high school student in Wuhan who murdered two members of a rival red guards association in 1966. I discuss the constructed feeling of “hate“ as part of the social role “people’s hero.” The second part of the paper analyses the legacy and transmission of these role concepts into the current society of mainland China in ‘apolitical’ settings like families. Using my interviews with the former sent-down youth and their children in Wuhan, I will analyse how these memories and feelings of this identification are transferred and updated into contemporary Chinese families as a form of construction of daily family life and conversations where intergenerational discourse can only fail.

Maria Nolan, “Youth, Home, and Urban Alienation in Contemporary China“

Over the past 40 years, as Chinese cities have undergone sweeping changes, the meaning of ‘home’ in urban China has simultaneously evolved. In Beijing, for example, older neighbourhoods have been razed through renovations starting in the early 1990s and continuing today, while out of the rubble emerge new commercial housing units and private compounds. Studies have shown that those relocated to new compounds may feel both a heightened sense of privacy and a greatly diminished sense of attachment to their surroundings (Cockain, 2012; Zhang, 2008). Today’s urban youth, however, were born into such increasingly privatised environments. Many have resided for most—or all —of their lives in modern apartment compounds in newer localities as cityscapes have been continually recreated. This paper explores—ethnographically—the extent to which China’s urban youth, accustomed to privatised home lifestyles, experience feelings of detachment from their urban environs, and illustrates how such feelings may be articulated. Alongside privatisation, urban redevelopment has led to what de Kloet and Fung (2017: 26) describe as youths’ ‘constant deterritorialisation’, while digital media, in providing diverse communication and entertainment options, are driving a reduction in engagement with spaces outside the home. If youth have never experienced a strong sense of relatedness with their neighbourhood or neighbours, is it something they desire? This paper analyses youths’ perceptions and experiences of city life in this context, and, with reference to Lefebvre’s writings on urban alienation, shows how they inform practices of everyday life both at home and in wider urban environments.

Lili Jiang, “The Changing Sense of Belonging of Chinese Master Students in Germany”

This paper explores the changing sense of belonging of a group of master students from mainland China during their stay in Germany. The main purpose is to understand how the students perceive their emotional attachment to China as home and how the perception gradually changed after their experiences in Germany, where they have learnt and developed different strategies to negotiate their sense of belonging. The study applies a combination of longitudinal method and the method of the biographical narrative interview which tracks 25 Chinese students’ lived experiences from their first semester until after they graduate from Germany, in order to capture their development. The paper provides longitudinal evidence to reveal the complex and multi-layered nature of these young students’ changing sense of home and also supports that students’ transcultural experiences in Germany may help them “unlearn” a normalized emotional attachment toward China which was partially imbued by the Patriotic Education Campaign from the 1990s and assist them to go beyond their state-bound national loyalty to postulate a potential transcultural position in today’s world.

Emotions in China

Locating Negative Affects in Post-Reform China
Wednesday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room 6

  • Organised by Lisa Richaud
  • Lisa Richaud, Chair
  • Kailing Xie, “The National Public Memorial Day for the Nanjing Massacres: Displays of Collective Pain and Shame and Their Importance in Governing Contemporary China”
  • Julian Mohr, “The Great Leap Forward Trauma in Stranger Sociability”
  • Xuefei Ma, “Speaking Bitterness and Misery Lamentation: Translating between Gender and Class in Rural Women’s Biographical Stories”
  • Gil Hizi, Discussant

If there is such thing as a dominant public sphere in post-reform China, its emotional tonality has often been described as overwhelmingly positive, as evidenced by the recent “happiness” campaigns or state-promoted “positive energy”. This panel takes this prevalence of positivity as an invitation to investigate its opposites: the expression and performativity of negative affects and emotions in everyday life and public culture. Here, negative affects are not only defined by their attendant dysphoric or unpleasant quality. Crucially, negativity derives from state-shaped emotional regimes, produced through explicit definitional acts or staged atmospheres that promote certain affects and dismiss or condemn others. What kind of cultural repertoires are available and appropriated for people to make sense of their emotional experiences? How do cultural artefacts contribute to shaping social imaginaries of stranger sociability centred around collective emotional experiences? How are affective publics formed, sustained, and (de)politicised in the Chinese authoritarian context? Beyond obvious forms of control over technologies of social connections, are there any mechanisms through which the Party-state may restrict the possibility to identify oneself as member of larger (counter) affective publics? Despite its pervasive use of positivity, does the party-state capitalise on negative affects to reproduce its legitimacy? The panel will attend to a variety of contexts, ranging from the negative affects ensuing from state-induced “situations of restricted agency”, the lingering traumas and fears of the Mao era, to the ways in which the party-state continues to govern (through) negative affects.

Kailing Xie, “The National Public Memorial Day for the Nanjing Massacres: Displays of Collective Pain and Shame and Their Importance in Governing Contemporary China”

Under the current Xi’s administration, the party-state has marked the 13th of December as the national public Memorial Day for the Nanjing massacres. Since 2014, this entails holding a series of public events accompanied by wide official media coverage to remind the public of the shame and pain of China’s weak past. Simultaneously, there has been a widespread state-promoted ‘positive energy’ and ‘happiness campaigns’ permeating in Chinese society, together with the state’s frequent announcement that China has achieved its national rejuvenation and entered ‘a new era’. This paper focuses on discourse circulated by China’s official media coverage to show how certain negative emotions such as pain and shame are publicly displayed and expressed to serve an instrumental function in China’s contemporary governance. In particular, the paper argues that state-endorsed negative emotions enhance its promotion of positivity in post-reform China. Similar to previous campaigns, like the ‘yi ku si tian’ (remembering bitterness and knowing sweetness) movement during the Cultural Revolution, it encourages the public to actively appreciate and internalise the ‘feeling of being fortunate enough’ to live under China’s ‘tai ping sheng shi’ (the time of peace and prosperity). It further extends the party-state’s disciplinary power to the public’s affective realm, with the aim to promote national unity and legitimise its rule. Instilling such collective negative emotions in the public restrict the transformative agency of other negative affects experienced by individuals facing rapid social and economic changes.

Julian Mohr, “The Great Leap Forward Trauma in Stranger Sociability“

According to Maurice Halbwachs, the construction of memory is not purely individual but embedded in the current social framework. As Weigelin-Schwiedrzik points out in her work, the traumatic experiences of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) and thus the negative feelings continue to be present in the communicative memory of the Chinese population in post-Mao China. It turns out, however, that the Communist Party’s repressive handling of the very discourse prevents it not only to be communicated as the failed policy in public spheres as it appears to be described in the certain historiography, especially in the West, but also from becoming part of cultural memory. What about the feelings of the transgenerational traumatised of the GLF in various public spheres? Being traumatised can mean, among other things, suffering from the contradiction of the feeling of unfeelingness: The avoidance of re-experiencing trauma-induced feelings. Lazar and Litvak-Hirsch emphasise that Jewish identity ultimately draws on a framing of the Holocaust that transcends internal ethnic, national, and generational differences. In this regard, I aim to examine, how these negative feelings of transgenerational transmitted trauma appear to be communicated outside the Chinese authoritarian context in newly formed stranger environments. Is it possible for the descendants of the eyewitnesses of the GLF to articulate the feelings in a public space with like-minded in a newly created stranger sociality? In addition, there is the question of the possibility of forming an affective “we” with reference to the GLF.

Xuefei Ma, “Speaking Bitterness and Misery Lamentation: Translating between Gender and Class in Rural Women’s Biographical Stories“

Misery Lamentation is a conventional genre in the culture of nüshu—a women-invented writing system in rural Jiangyong of south China. Its writing and related performative events facilitate a gendered community of sentiments. In the CCP-led Speaking Bitterness campaign that generates class-centred feelings in the socialist era, Misery Lamentation is never curated. This paper investigates the historical encounters between Speaking Bitterness and Misery Lamentation, as a lens to explore the tensions and (un)translatability between China’s gender and class politics from the socialist past to the post-reform present. I analyse the textual, contextual, and intertextual relations of nüshu’s historical archives and the production of what I call Neo-misery Lamentation through my ethnography on The He Jiyu Lamentation (2018) and The Zhu Liurui Lamentation (2019). I make the following arguments. First, while Speaking Bitterness translates gender issues into class struggles, Misery Lamentation draws upon women’s empathetic bonding and refuses to be appropriated in the Maoist “class” vocabulary, thus becoming the unrecognised and unrecognisable bitterness. Second, in the Neo-misery Lamentation, the formulation of Speaking Bitterness (Gail Hershatter, 2013) is passed down, regulates women’s perception of their life courses, mediates the expression of the left-behind rural women, and paradoxically produces positive feelings from women’s marginalised positions. Third, in the formation of neoliberal subjects in post-reform China, the historical tensions between gender and class are distributed as “middle-class norms” (Hai Ren, 2013) in the multiple-layered governance of the nation-state, patriarchal institutions of family and workplace, and the regulated sphere for women’s homosociality.

Papers on Arts IV

Pictures
Thursday
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm

  • Chaired by Martina Caschera
  • Bryce Heatherly, “Commentaries Illustrated: New Methods for Visual Exegesis in a Ming (1368–1644) Woodblock Print of the Diamond Sutra”
  • Miki Homma, “A Chinese Printmaking ‘The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars’ from Saray Album in Istanbul”
  • Yvonne Lin, “’Slobbery, Dusty, and Scratched’: Decay as Fetish in Beijing Silvermine”
  • Adina Simona Zemanek, “International Visibility and Official Promotion of Taiwanese Comics: A Case Study of the Angoulême International Comics Festival”

Bryce Heatherly, “Commentaries Illustrated: New Methods for Visual Exegesis in a Ming (1368–1644) Woodblock Print of the Diamond Sutra”

This paper examines a specific mode of illustration designed to accompany printed editions of one of the most widely-recited sutras in the Chinese Buddhist tradition, the Diamond Sutra (Jin’gang jing 金剛經). In a rare illustrated edition of this sutra, printed four times throughout the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the sutra text itself is imbedded with 46 full-page “commentarial illustrations,” which visually interpret various historical commentaries on the Diamond Sutra. Since the advent of woodblock printing in China, printed illustrations of the Diamond Sutra have employed a variety of para-sutraic visual modes, yet previous studies have focused either on sutra frontispieces (feihua 扉畫) or on illustrations of miracle tales (lingyan gushi tu 靈驗故事圖). To date, no comprehensive study has been conducted on the role of commentarial illustrations in these sutra prints. This essay, while examining the textual origins of the commentaries – some penned by religious luminaries like Huineng 慧能 (638–713), others by little-known lay scholars – demonstrates that these illustrations are not subordinate to their texts, but rather constitute their own “text,” which serves the dual functions of edification and entertainment. Setting these illustrations within the development of the illustrated sutra in China, this paper engages with the broader scholarly discourses on the aesthetic dimensions of woodblock printing, and the shifting relationships between text and image, readership and viewership.

Miki Homma, “A Chinese Printmaking “The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars” from Saray Album in Istanbul”

This paper will discuss an illustration of The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars 二十四孝 in Saray Albums (Istanbul, Topkapi Palace Library). The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars is a book of Confucianism in China. This Chinese Confucian classic is pasted on the Saray Album in Istanbul was probably imported from China during the Timurid Dynasty (1370–1507). A number of studies indicate that there is a relationship between China and West Asia, but no detailed research has been done about Chinese printmaking imported to the Timurid Dynasty.
This paper carefully examines the characteristics of The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars in the Saray Albums. It is in a rare form compared to other Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) printed books because it is not in the form of full-page illustrations or figure on above and text in lower composition, but in the form divided into 6 sections. The paintings are brightly coloured, showing that the original prints imported from China were painted by Islamic painters regardless of the theme. It is hard to believe that it was read by the general public or had an artistic influence like a similar kind of Chinese printed book imported to Japan. This Chinese printmaking in Saray Albums is an important example that suggests the possibility that such printmaking was also imported to Western Asia.
By comparing the The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars imported to East Asia (Japan) and West Asia (Timurid Dynasty) during the Ming dynasty, this paper shows the iconographic similarities and differences.

Yvonne Lin, “’Slobbery, Dusty, and Scratched’: Decay as Fetish in Beijing Silvermine”

My paper examines the aesthetics of patina in Thomas Sauvin’s found photography collection, Beijing Silvermine, which travels the international gallery circuit but also lives online as a popular Instagram account. The original set of negatives was salvaged from a recycling plant in Beijing and dates from 1985 to 2005, an era corresponding to the economic liberalisation of the PRC.
I focus on photographs in which decay—arresting patterns of lattices, blur, scratches, and discolouration—are foregrounded against a backdrop of the every day, injecting an experimental mode into a complex of vernacular photographs. I argue that the aesthetics of patina in vernacular photography functions as a commodified problematic of time. In the context of Instagram, which acts as a direct marketplace and advertisement, the decayed emulsion is a visual effect lifted from the material processes of its production. I further contend that historicity as filter reflects not nostalgic yearning but the fetishisation of temporal passage, whose success relies on a gesture towards authenticity that is always already undermined in a virtual experience.
Although scholars have written extensively on the decay in the work of filmmakers or conceptual photographers, the aesthetics of decay in vernacular photography remains underexplored. I situate a formal analysis of these photographs within a theoretical framework that draws from theories of found photography, new media studies, and the cultural history of photography. Through an interrogation of the aesthetics of patina in Beijing Silvermine, my paper will deepen our conception of the practice of narrating the cultural history of postsocialist China.

Adina Simona Zemanek, “International Visibility and Official Promotion of Taiwanese Comics. A Case Study of the Angoulême International Comics Festival”

Comics in Taiwan have a long history of association with Japanese manga, children’s entertainment, and negative value judgments. In recent years, the mainstream manga-style art has been paralleled by the rise of independent artists who cultivate individual styles, target older audiences, and work on a variety of topics including social activism, local culture, history, and memory. Despite these developments, homegrown artists still tended to remain invisible to both the general public and to state institutions promoting Taiwan’s cultural and creative industries and its international image.
This project focuses on the Angoulême International Comics Festival, where Taiwanese artists gained acclaim and have been showcased since 2012 by local organisers at first, and later also by the ROC Ministry of Culture. Based on interviews with three kinds of actors participating in this prestigious festival (artists, publishers and representatives of state institutions), this study attempts to assess how and to what extent Taiwanese comics have been revalued and granted visibility, supported, and integrated into official projects related to public diplomacy. It will also look at how artists and publishers themselves perceive this European event and state backing for homegrown comics.
The following aspects will be considered: 1) criteria and procedures for the selection of state-subsidised works, artists and publishers; 2) Taiwanese comic artists’ and publishers’ motivation for participating in the festival and its potential impact on their careers or marketing strategies; 3) the extent to which all these actors work towards capturing a specifically Taiwanese “cultural geometry” (K. Murphy) in internationally promoted comics.

Papers on Arts III

Performance
Wednesday
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Room G

  • Chaired by Rossella Ferrari
  • Freerk Heule, “The Jesuits Rameau and Amiot as Links in the European–Chinese World of Music in the 18th Century”
  • Moshan Guo, “Foreign Race, Masculinity, and Underclass Voice: A Discussion on Yan Jin’s Stardom in 1930s China”
  • Agota Revesz, “The Political Economy of Chinese Theatre”
  • Andreea Chirita, “Adapting History to Stage Performance in Urban China

Freerk Heule, “The Jesuits Rameau and Amiot as Links in the European–Chinese World of Music in the 18th Century”

The Jesuit Order was a major factor as a cultural intermediary between the West and the Chinese Empire. J.-P. Rameau (1683–1764), educated at a Jesuit seminary, played the organ and clavichord. His musical theory ‘Treatise on Harmony’ of 1722 dealt with the 12-note music scale. After 1733, he found opera with music, dance, and vocal arts could better express his thoughts with Classicist, Jesuit, Masonic, and ‘New World Order’ concepts, characteristic for the Enlightenment era. In the francophone world it led to quarrels between admirers of Lully (1632–1687), Rousseau (1712–1778)—on theoretical grounds: harmony over melody—and Italian music lovers.
It was Rameau’s Jesuit confrater J.-M. Amiot (Qian Deming 钱德明 1718–1793) proto-sinologist, author, and translator of books on ‘the Middle Country’ (China), as well as a musicologist who wrote ‘Music of the Chinese’ and ‘Sacred Music’ (Shengyue jing pu 圣乐经谱 1779). Amiot also translated principles of Chinese music in his ‘Chinese Divertissements.’ He took Rameau’s music to Peking by performing ‘Dance of the Savages’, later included as a suite in the opera-ballet The Gallant Indies of the librettist Louis Fuzelier (Paris Opéra, 23 August 1735), for the Chinese literati. A Pekinese observer, however, wrote ‘Nothing of all this made an impression on the Chinese hearts and souls’. To conclude, scientists thought Amiot and Rameau’s information on pentatonicism could be a fundamental international concept of music.

Moshan Guo, “Foreign Race, Masculinity, and Underclass Voice: A Discussion on Yan Jin’s Stardom in 1930s China”

Jin Yan was one of the most important male stars in the 1930s in Chinese cinema. This paper analyses Jin Yan’s star image in the 1930s from the perspectives of the screen image he created, his star image in public view, and his role of the narrator of the underclass discourse. In combination with the development of Chinese films in the 1930s, this paper focus on Jin Yan’s role as a masculine and patriarchal rebel, as well as his unique westernised lifestyle and his alien identity to conclude the formation of Jin Yan’s star status.

Agota Revesz, “The Political Economy of Chinese Theatre”

The paper focuses on traditional Chinese theatre (commonly called “Chinese opera”) and, most importantly, on its socio-political context. First I deal with the question of local vs. pan-Chinese identities as a decisive factor in stage production, then introduce the desire for upward social mobility of local forms in a system of strict cultural hierarchy. I also touch briefly upon the reasons why Beijing Opera and Kunqu became the two internationally promoted “national operas.” The focus is on present-day production and its background. The “political economy” of traditional Chinese theatre can and should be taken as an example for the very complex and in several ways the complementary relationship between culture and politics in China. Stage narratives are politicised, as is the idea of heritage, and it is the interest of the current regime to support traditional theatre production. If we take a look at this broader picture, we see that the “political economy” of traditional Chinese theatre is very different from the context of European theatre. This difference is, however, symptomatic, and might also assist to understand differences in other areas. This interdisciplinary topic has not received scholarly attention before. The paper summarises some of the results of my postdoctoral research conducted at Freie Universität Berlin in 2015–2016. The whole work will soon be published as a book.

Andreea Chirita, “Adapting History to Stage Performance in Urban China”

Historic-themed performances are not a rarity within the contemporary Chinese theatre landscape. While the general trend embraced by theatre-makers is to pinpoint the heroic and larger-than-life attributes of various historic Chinese leaders, a small group of avant-garde directors come up with decanoninzig visions, meant to challenge the traditional grasp of Chinese history by its youthful, urban, patriotic audience. Such is the case of experimental director Wang Chong (b.1982), who, in 2012, brought to the Chinese and Japanese stage his original, parodic vision of communist propaganda movie The Landmine Warfare (1962). My paper investigates the aesthetic modes through which Wang recreates the original version, by means of parody, irony and ideological symbols, and adapts it to the Chinese contemporary socio-historic and ideological background. If the original film formulates the patriotism of a small Chinese village in its quest to outwit and annihilate the ‘Japanese devils’ during the Sino-Japanese war, the theatrical adaptation moves its location to the city and engages textually, creatively and critically with this story, turning it upside down. The result: a brand-new product, that questions the present anti-Japanese feeling among many Chinese urban youths. My paper further analyses how the double nature of this adaptation debunks the historical contingencies that lead to the present nationalistic ideologies among Chinese youngsters. The way in which urban young audiences comply with such surprising ‘remediated stories’ adapted from canonical historic propaganda is another aspect to be investigated.

Fuelling the “Republican Fever”

Findings from China’s Contemporary (Audio)visual Popular Culture
Wednesday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm
Room G

  • Organised by Giovanna Puppin
  • Rossella Ferrari, Chair
  • Giovanna Puppin, “(Re)nationalising Consumerism: Metersbonwe’s ‘I Am a New National Product’ (Wo shi xin guohuo 我是新国货, 2011) Advertising Campaign as a Case Study”
  • Katie Hill, “Legacies of The Modern in Contemporary Art from China: Echoes of the Republican in Imagery of the Body”
  • Martina Caschera, “From Modern Comic Strip to Contemporary Animation: Sanmao’s Breaking of Time and Media Boundaries”
  • Sandy Ng, “Be the Change You Wish to See: Femininity, Heritage, and Transformation in the ‘Modern Woman’”
  • Hiu Man Chan, “Sleepless Shanghai: Recreating the Golden Cinema-Going Culture for Foreign Films”

The expression “Republican fever” refers to the upsurge of interest in the legacy of Republican China (1911–1949), and became increasingly popular in 2011, during the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic.
The Republican period was characterised by unprecedented academic and media freedom, a positive image of entrepreneurship and creativity, as well as the first tide of consumerism, among others. In this fertile context, new modern forms of (audio)visual popular culture thrived, contributing to the artistic production and consumption of the time. More precisely, visual arts, comic strips and cartoons, advertising, movies, as well as design and photography started to play a crucial role in ongoing debates on rising consumerism, national identity, economic modernisation, and imperialism.
While the existing literature tends to focus on the uses and significance of these (audio)visual forms in the context of Republican China, the papers of this panel adopt either a diachronic or a synchronic “snapshot” perspective to provide some original insights into the different ways in which “Republican fever” is being embedded and brought back to life in a variety of texts, discourses, and practices in contemporary China.
The papers of this panel focus on examples coming from the realms of visual arts, comic strips and cartoons, advertising, cinema-going culture, as well as design and photography, and attempt to critically assess the processes of evolution, adaptation, intertextual reference, and/or (re)production at play, with the final objective of interpreting the renewed ideological role of “Republican fever” in a different historical, social, cultural, and political context—that of contemporary China.

Giovanna Puppin, “(Re)nationalising Consumerism: Metersbonwe’s ‘I Am a New National Product’ (Wo shi xin guohuo 我是新国货, 2011) Advertising Campaign as a Case Study:

In the early 20th-century, the tensions between consumerism and nationalism became central to the creation of China as a modern nation. The National Product Movement aimed at restricting the purchase of foreign products and encouraging the consumption of national products, in an attempt to promote a nationalist consumer culture and new ways of “being Chinese”. In 2011, the year that marked the 100th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution, China’s most popular high street brand, Metersbonwe, launched an advertising campaign evocatively entitled “I Am a New National Product” (Wo shi xin guohuo 我是新国货). This paper provides a critical interpretive analysis of this case study, with a focus on the (audio)visual languages employed and the advertising strategies and appeals at play. This illustrates the revival and adaptation of the concept of “national products” in contemporary China, as well as evaluating its meanings and ideological implications. The campaign comprises eight print and audiovisual executions, each of which features a domestic celebrity from one of China’s emerging creative industries. It is characterised by extensive intertextual references with nationalistic slogans, old animated movies, and underpinned by a recurrent feeling of nostalgia for the past and a sense of pride for the present.  The findings of this analysis shed light on the complex dynamics between consumerism and nationalism, the country’s ongoing search for modernity, its ambivalent relationship with the West and, more importantly, its changing perceptions about itself as embedded in the contemporary advertising discourse.

Katie Hill, “Legacies of The Modern in Contemporary Art from China: Echoes of the Republican in Imagery of the Body“

This paper examines representations of the body in contemporary art that appear to echo republican China as central motifs in an extended iteration of cultural modernity. In the 1920s, oil painting became a medium for constructing modern culture through a foreign understanding of the body.  The nude as a trope of modernity via the Western tradition brought into being a dramatic shift of social and physical understandings, in tandem with dress and hairstyles in urbanised society. Contemporary works of art in the twenty-first century have revived this imagery in works by photographers and artists such as Yang Fudong and Birdhead, primarily in the context of Shanghai as an urban centre of modernity continually constructing localised imagery that holds nostalgic or wistful elements. Broad visual cultural contexts are explored to develop a sense of how materiality and the foregrounding of bodily presence in early twentieth-century art are continued with notions of the body as signifier making overt or layered connections to pre-CCP visuality. This development shows a continuum as a key thread of visual modernity that lengthens China’s modernity into the present in different modes. 

Martina Caschera, “From Modern Comic Strip to Contemporary Animation: Sanmao’s Breaking of Time and Media Boundaries“

In 2006, an animated series titled Sanmao liulang ji 三毛流浪记 (Wanderings of Sanmao or The Story of Sanmao’s Vagrant Life) was produced and broadcast by China Central Television (CCTV). It revolves around the adventures of the homeless orphan Sanmao (literally, “Three hairs”), and is set in the Republican Era when the little hero was actually created by the artist Zhang Leping (1910–1992). The series, which was uploaded online soon after its broadcast, is still met with great nostalgia on China’s major video sharing platforms (Bilibili, Youku). Despite the abundance of academic literature related to the first decades of Zhang Leping’s production, there is still a significant research gap on the aforementioned 2006 animated series and the so-called “Sanmao Revival.” This paper investigates the historical evolution of the long-lived and beloved child-hero Sanmao from the Republican to the Reform era, by examining the relationship between some selected original comic strips of the 1930s–1940s and the animated series of 2006. The analysis highlights the discursive peculiarities of each text, as well as the strategies of transmedial adaptation, and focuses on how the visual rhetoric employed and the emotions emerging manage to satisfy different ideological agendas. The analysis of Sanmao liulang ji provided here, therefore, leads to original findings related to the complex relationship between the cultural production of modern and contemporary China.

Sandy Ng, “Be the Change You Wish to See: Femininity, Heritage, and Transformation in the ‘Modern Woman‘”

This paper will explore how women asserted their identities through representations that increased their visibility and affirmed their sense of self during the Republican era, thus leading to a redefinition of femininity in contemporary China. It discusses women as objectified subjects and avid consumers, particularly in graphic designs, photographs, and paintings from the Republican era that feature a modern lifestyle. How has consumption transformed women’s appearance and mentality? How have these changes affected the ways they perceived themselves? Did consumption impart a sense of respectability to the Modern Woman? Can we argue that the Modern Woman introduced design, modern lifestyle and taste to Chinese culture as a new form of heritage that redefined women’s social status? The discussion will examine visual evidence that portrays daily life in order to provide an understanding on women’s cultural and social roles—particularly as consumers and urban citizens—in the process of embracing designs and lifestyle in the tumultuous Republican period and in contemporary China.

Hiu Man Chan, “Sleepless Shanghai: Recreating the Golden Cinema-Going Culture for Foreign Films”

As reflected in Zhen Zhang’s (2005) An Amorous History of the Silver Screen, Shanghai was the centre for international cinema culture in Republican China. Films from the US and Europe opened at cinemas every week, attracting many local followers. The cinematic experience went beyond the screen, and included stardom, fan cults, theatre architecture, as well as fashion. This “golden cinema-going culture” relied on the availability of the latest foreign films. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, policies on the import of foreign films changed significantly. Today, a quota system restricts the number of foreign films to be released in China each year in order to protect the local film industry. Since 2013, though, Shanghai has started an alternative practice, which consists of organising short-term film seasons to exhibit a limited number of foreign films, thus once more allowing the Shanghai audience to experience the “golden cinema-going culture”. In this paper, I evaluate this unique cultural practice undertaken by the Shanghai Film Distribution and Exhibition Association, which has regulated the regional film industry since 2013. How has the Association established an innovative mechanism to promote cinema-going culture under the status quo? Can this practice be sustained in the future, and how? The materials I analyse include primary sources of press releases and exhibition programmes, and audience receptions as secondary sources. This practice, I argue, contributes to maintaining Shanghai’s historical status as the most active centre for foreign film exhibition in China.

Papers on Arts II

Modern
Wednesday
9:00 am – 10:45 am
Room G

  • Chaired by Sandy Ng
  • Pascale Elbaz, “Liu Haisu’s Journal in Europe: A Unique View on European Modern Painting”
  • Remy Jarry, “The Chairman’s Old Clothes: Study of the Annex of Shaoshan Mao Zedong Memorial Museum”
  • Giorgio Strafella, Daria Berg, “Borders, Marginality, and the Contemporary: Yang Zhichao’s Art at the Turn of the 21st Century”

Pascale Elbaz, “Liu Haisu’s Journal in Europe: A Unique View on European Modern Painting”

Liu Haisu played a very important role in Chinese Modern Art and Chinese Modern Art Education. During his two long visits in Europe in the early 30es, he visited museums and art galleries; copied classical paintings that would serve as models for the art students of the Shanghai Art School he created with other artists and leading political and cultural leaders; and painted a series of landscape and portraits that were exhibited both in Europe and back in China. All of this artistic and creative life was accomplished in parallel with a more literary one, as he wrote continuously his thoughts and feelings about art pieces and art circles, urban and cultural landscapes, important European history and religious facts, in Shanghainese newspapers. Some of the essays written during his first eleven-month stay in Europe (1929–1931) were put together and published under the name Ouyou suibi [Europe under my writing pen] in Shanghai in 1933. We will introduce this fresh and intense book, focusing both on Liu Haisu’s comments on paintings from Delacroix and Courbet he copied in Le Louvre Museum, on impressionists and post-impressionists paintings from Monnet, Matisse, Vlaminck, and on the key concepts of aesthetics that emerge from his writings and that would be read by a large part of the artistic and literary circles in China as a direct and unique view on European Modern Painting through the eyes of a Chinese painter.

Remy Jarry, “The Chairman’s Old Clothes: Study of the Annex of Shaoshan Mao Zedong Memorial Museum”

Mao Zedong Memorial Museum was inaugurated in October 1964, 2 years before the death of the founder of the People’s Republic of China. Located at a walking distance from his childhood home in the city of Shaoshan (Hunan Province), the primary goal of the museum was to perpetrate Mao’s cult of personality with a hagiographic display of his greatest deeds and ideas. Whereas the country had gone through historical reforms and major changes from the late 1970s, the museum hadn’t really changed until the late 2000s. But in December 2008, it has been significantly reshaped with the opening of an annexe in a distinct building. This large and modern annexe is not exactly an extension of the original building. Known as Mao Zedong Relic Museum 毛澤東遺物館, it actually displays Mao’s personal belongings such as his clothes (dressing gown, bathing suit, socks, etc.), pieces of furniture (bookshelves and library, chair, bed, cushions, etc.) and miscellaneous accessories (glasses, cigarettes, watches, hat, etc.). The second floor of the annexe is mostly dedicated to Mao’s calligraphy, asserting his talent as a calligrapher and poet. As a result, the new complex is presenting a different narrative from the initial complex: it operates a shift from official history and ideology to material culture, art and emotions. The design of the museum also ground-breaking: its state-of-the-art curating upgraded by the use of new technologies tends surprisingly to mimic contemporary art installations. Thus, its ultimate attempt seems to be the creation of an intimate and empathic relationship with the viewers, while creating Mao’s new persona for future generations.

Giorgio Strafella, Daria Berg, “Borders, Marginality, and the Contemporary: Yang Zhichao’s Art at the Turn of the 21st Century”

This paper analyses the theme of marginality and liminality in the artistic oeuvre of Yang Zhichao (b. 1963), who has been one of China’s most prominent experimental artists since the 1990s. Mainly through the media of Performance Art and art installations, Yang Zhichao’s works explore the issue of social and cultural marginality in modern society—from the condition of migrant workers, beggars, and psychiatric patients, to the geographical frontiers of Chinese civilisation and the status of the avant-garde artist in reform era China (1978–present). Artworks discussed in this paper include Yang Zhichao’s performance Tanning (2000) and the installation Chinese Bible (2009), as well as his Kong Bu and Dingzi drawings (2002–2007)—the latter representing an example of how Yang has merged the language of Performance Art with the idea of drawing and calligraphy as time-based art. While existing literature on Yang Zhichao’s art has focussed on his most “shocking” performances such as Planting Grass (2000) and Iron (2000), this paper analyses two contemporaneous works of Performance Art entitled Within the Fourth Ring (1999) and Jiayu Pass (1999–2000). The first centred around the experience of homelessness and the second around life in a psychiatric hospital, both works stem from Yang Zhichao’s belief that without placing one’s own body in the circumstances of marginalised groups the artist can never move beyond observing them ‘as a bystander or a voyeur’ (authors’ interview with the artist, 2014). By analysing these particular artworks, this study highlights the uniquely “Contemporary” (in Agamben’s sense) character of Yang Zhichao’s approach to time-based art.

Papers on Philosophy VI

Confucianism
Friday
11:00 am – 12:45 pm

  • Chaired by Yumi Suzuki
  • Margus Ott, “Extended Knowledge in the Analects, Mozi, and Zhuangzi”
  • Yumi Suzuki, “Environmental Philosophy in Early Confucianism”
  • Xing Lan, “No Fear from Heaven: Revisiting the 11th-Century Chinese Debate on Five Phases Theory in the Interpretation of Portents”

Margus Ott, “Extended Knowledge in the Analects, Mozi, and Zhuangzi”

One prominent idea in embodied epistemology is that knowledge is not generated or processed by the brain or even by one’s body only, but extends to things and beings in the environment. In contemporary philosophical discussions of embodied epistemology, some common examples of extended knowledge include technical devices such as hammers, cars and computers. However, ritual objects are not often discussed. I investigate three examples of extendedness in early Chinese philosophy: (1) Ritual items in the Analects (e.g. jade tablet, zither); (2) the Mozi’s technical devices (compass, square, ink-line, water-line, plumb-line); and (3) objects in the Zhuangzi’s self-cultivation stories (ox’s carcass, wood, water). In the Analects, ritual items are contextualized in embodied thinking processes. By contrast, the Mozi’s discussions of technical devices are set against themes of decontextualization and disembodiment. Finally, the Zhuangzi’s self-cultivation objects have a practical purpose, like those in the Mozi. However, in the Zhuangzi’s stories, the themes of contextualised and embodied knowledge are even more prominent. The embodied processes undertaken by the Zhuangzi’s masters generate a new, contextualised knowledge, through the decentering and transformation of self.

Yumi Suzuki, “Environmental Philosophy in Early Confucianism”

Unlike Daoism whose ideal way of life is generally thought to be compatible with contemporary environmental ethics, early Confucianism is often thought to have never regarded the natural environment as an important subject. Both Kongzi’s agnostic attitude towards heavenly events (Lunyu 5/13, 11/12) and Xunzi’s accounts of hierarchic relations between humans, animals, and plants (Xunzi 9/39/9-10) typically represent their limited focusses on social and political affairs. Nevertheless, strong interests in human nature (xìng 性) found in the Mengzi and the Xunzi indicates that both Confucian moral values such as rén 仁 and yì 義 and ideal political institutes are natural creations inevitable and indispensable for human flourishment. This paper, therefore, demonstrates that Xunzi’s political philosophy deeply originates with his keen discernment of heavenly nature (tiān 天). Xunzi maintains that yāo 妖 (ominous events) such as famine and diseases as caused by political deficiency, but not by natural or supernatural forces (17/81/10-82/4) and that the virtue (dé 德) of the ruler lies in his ‘ecological responsibilities’ of properly responding to natural revolutions to succeed in various domestic enterprises completed at proper times and effectively coping with the natural crises (17/79/16-21) as well as satisfying and regulating the nature of its people since humans intrinsically do not differ from other animals (23/113/3 ff.). I suggest that his attempt is not to integrate nature into his anthropocentric political system but on the contrary to align the political system with its own natural state and surroundings, thus rather can be nature-centred.

Xing Lan, “No Fear from Heaven: Revisiting the 11th-Century Chinese Debate on Five Phases Theory in the Interpretation of Portents”

This study discusses why and how Confucian thinkers in the 11th-century criticised the application of the Five Phases theory to explain portents.
In China, portents have been interpreted within the framework of the Five Phases since the 1st century. This portent interpretation has been analysed from different angles. Some studies have shed light on the formation of this tradition during the Han Dynasty (Sivin 1995, Espesset 2016) but very few studies engage in the alterations and challenges which convey essential changes in Chinese intellectual history.
To fill in this gap, this paper focuses on the Chinese scholarly discussion about separating the Five Phases from the interpretation of portents in the 11th century. This discussion involved numerous famous scholars like Wang Anshi, Ouyang Xiu, and Su Shi and was also largely advanced through the reformation of Wang Anshi.
My paper is to argue that both intellectuals and officials in the 11th century were dissatisfied with the application of the Five Phases in interpreting portents, but invalidating it was difficult because it was established in Han’s commentaries on the Confucian classics. Instead of challenging the authority of Confucius, they also reflected ideas in the form of commentary to remove the application of the Five Phases.
In my paper, I will distinguish three different strategies of argumentation within this historical debate: denying the authenticity of chapters about the Five Phases in the Confucian classics, refusing Han scholars’ interpretation about the Five Phases, and revealing contradictions in received principles of the Five Phases.

Papers on Philosophy II

Medieval to Ming
Tuesday
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm

  • Chaired by Olga Bonch-Osmolovskaia
  • Olga Bonch-Osmolovskaia, “Classical Scholarship in the Three Kingdoms Period: Exegetical Methods and Commentarial Types”
  • Immanuel Spaar, “Confucian Education under the Influence of Wang Shouren: Cultivation of the Elite and Instruction of the Populace”
  • Nikolai Rudenko, “Allusions in Chinese Philosophical Texts: Problems of Detection Method and Interpretation”

Olga Bonch-Osmolovskaia, “Classical Scholarship in the Three Kingdoms Period: Exegetical Methods and Commentarial Types”

The objective of this paper is to analyse the process of the development of Early Medieval Confucian commentary as one of the most important forms of the existence of exegetical tradition and to identify the basic laws and generalising factors of its dynamic development. The historical scope of the study is confined mainly to the Three Kingdoms period since it was in precisely this time that after the fall of Han dynasty Confucian exegetics had undergone serious structural and ideological changes, as well as the emergence (or rise of popularity) of new types of commentary and shaping of new scholarly and intellectual ideals, which to a large extent determined the course of exegetical thought development in subsequent eras, took place. The paper is based on detailed analysis of commentarial works themselves (when not survived, then reconstructed, mentioned, or cited in other historical sources) and accounts from official dynastic histories, especially their biographical and bibliographical chapters. This material allows to identify particular characteristics of each commentarial type frequently used by medieval exegetes (for example, nan 難, bo 駁, wen 問, ping 評, yin 音, lun 論, yi 議, zhu 注, jie 解, etc.), systematically analyse and compare them, correlate their functions, popularity/unpopularity with the changing trends in Confucian exegetical thought, and, therefore, identify the main factors of its development.

Immanuel Spaar, “Confucian Education under the Influence of Wang Shouren: Cultivation of the Elite and Instruction of the Populace”

Educational matters were formally monopolised in the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644), when the court established community schools and defined an educational common ground. But soon the influence of the court on what in modern terms is understood as education diminished. One attempt to gradually popularise a Confucian understanding of learning and education has started with Wang Shouren (1472–1528). Despite his disagreement with official interpretations of key passages in the Confucian canon, what Wang practised was still deeply informed by Confucian ideas gleaned from the canonised writings. My presentation uses Wang Shouren’s dispatchment to Jiangxi between 1517 and 1521 as a perspective on educational policies that were implemented by the scholarly elite. It will work out a focused theoretical background regarding teaching and learning concepts from the Confucian canon. This leads to a judgement of Wang Shouren’s legacy in Jiangxi in terms of educational measures. The solutions he proposed were a reaction to local politics. They combined Confucian-educational ideas with administrative-political reality. I will rely on source texts from the complete works of Wang Shouren in order to present his communication to officials and to ordinary households. After Wang’s death, people from Jiangxi were decisive in forming new learning curriculums. They gradually took over educational matters formerly belonging to the central court of the Ming. Therefore, despite intellectual discussions and factional strife, I tend to see Wang and his school in a larger developmental process of the late Ming, with potential inclination to the education of commoners.

Nikolai Rudenko, “Allusions in Chinese Philosophical Texts: Problems of Detection Method and Interpretation”

One of the most difficult but crucially important operations a researcher needs to carry out during the translation of Chinese philosophical texts is the detection and correct interpretation of allusions and references to other texts—mostly to philosophical and historical Classics and famous poetry. In particular, the essays of A Book to Burn (Fen shu 焚書), the opus magnum of late Ming thinker Li Zhi (李贄, 1527–1602), are flooded with different kinds of allusions, dealing with which inevitably becomes an issue of vital importance to any researcher who tries to reconstruct its core philosophical ideas.
On the basis of my previous research of A Book to Burn I would like to share my experience concerning the stated problem and overview the main instruments for detecting allusions I use as well as to offer a draft typology of allusions based on their function (e.g. appellation to authority, implicit irony, and critique, increase of expressiveness, construction of multi-level philosophical concepts etc.). During the presentation, several cases of these allusions’ detection and interpretation will also be demonstrated. The presented method has already shown relatively high efficiency: for example, in Li Zhi’s autobiographical essay An Outline of Zhuowu in [the Form of] Discourse (Zhuowu lun lüe 卓吾論略) 19 allusions have been detected, while infamous previous translations of this essay into English (Pauline C. Lee), German (Ph. Grimberg), French (J.F. Billeter) and Modern Chinese (Zhang Jianye) together only 6 of them were discovered.