Workshop
Leiden University-Zurich University Workshop: Ecocritical Perspectives in East Asian Art and Culture
- Date
- Thursday 31 October 2024
- Time
- Address
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Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- Lipsius 2.27
Ecocritical Perspectives in East Asian Art and Culture
This workshop brings together historians of the arts of East Asia to highlight the agency of nonhuman actors and actants in shaping knowledge about the world in visual and material culture in the early modern period and beyond. Presentations will cover the representation of animals and plants, paying particular attention to their relationship with human actors. In addition, we see this relation not as a one-way and hierarchic human-centered process but as a continuous feedback loop between people and the environment.
This event is sponsored by Isaac Alfred Ailion Foundation.
Programme:
9.30 – 9.40 Opening
9.40 – 12.10 Panel 1
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1. Nika Abdolalizadeh, Anna Gygli, Nadja Rauscher, Cecilia Trachsler, Protector or Threat? The Ambiguous Symbolism of the Tiger in Korean Art and Culture 2. Sandro Boccuzzo, Zian Chen, Sanja Novosel, Suli Yang, Birds in Japanese Textiles: Cultural and Ecological Perspectives 3. Juliana Furrer, Candice Kang, Marina Wachsmuth, The Shifting Significance of the Camel in East Asian Art History |
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12.10 – 13.40 Lunch break
13.40 – 14.00 Presentation of Fan Lin and Doreen Mueller co-edited, Picturing Animals and Plants in Early Modern China and Japan: Innovation, Experiments, and Anxieties (Amsterdam University Press, January 2025)
14.00 – 15.30 Panel 2
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15.30 – 16.00 Break
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Abstracts
Freya Terryn, Famous Sights for Foreign Eyes: The Japanese Landscape in Hiroshige III’s Diplomatic Paintings
In 1869, the new Meiji government embarked on its first diplomatic ventures, preparing for visits from the first foreign royal to Japan, British Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh (1844–1900), and a delegation representing Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I (1830–1916) and Empress Elizabeth Amalie Eugenie (1837–1898). Lavish gifts were meticulously prepared for both occasions, prominently featuring accordion-style painting albums (gajō 画帖) that contained fifty silk paintings mounted on cardboard, with each page adorned by gold sprinkles. Prince Alfred received ten albums totaling five hundred paintings, while Empress Elizabeth received two albums containing fifty paintings each. Hiroshige III was the sole artist to contribute Japanese landscapes to these sets, providing sixty-seven works in total—one album of fifty paintings for the British royal, and seventeen paintings for the Austro-Hungarian Empress. This talk examines how Hiroshige III approached the depiction of famous sights (meisho 名所) for a foreign audience, focusing on how visual references informed the creation of specific pictorial elements and compositions. This analysis is crucial considering Hiroshige III had been the head of the studio for only two years and was primarily known for his satirical prints prior to this prestigious commission.
Qinxin He, Beyond Visual Appeal: The Conceptualized Scent of Peonies and its Representation during the Tang-Song China
The tree-peony (mudan, 牡丹), with its flamboyant blossoms and symbolic significance of wealth and honor, has long been praised as “the king of flowers” with “nationwide beauty and celestial fragrance” 國色天香 in Chinese culture. The allure of peonies is not limited to their visual appeal, inviting a multisensory experience in which ‘scent’ plays a crucial role. From the late Tang to the Song dynasties (ca. 9th-13th centuries), while the ethical and moral concerns surrounding the visual indulgence of peonies were taken seriously, their scents were far more eagerly pursued by the Tang-Song enthusiasts, as reflected in peony images and incense-making practices. On one hand, several visual languages were applied in the Tang-Song paintings and patterned objects to picture the scent of peonies, such as by combining peony shrubs with odor-sensitive insects (e.g., butterflies and bees), juxtaposing peony patterns with scented objects, and embedding peonies in the female space. On the other hand, synthetic incense made from peony-barks and other species was conceptualized as having the scent of peony-flowers, which was fondly used to perfume the clothing during the Song dynasty. Through the synesthesia of these visual and olfactory practices, I contend that it was the perception and imagination of the scent of peonies that greatly enhanced people’s attitudes towards such alluring flowers during the Tang-Song transition period.
Alva Speth, Productive Estrangement? From flighty birds to luminescent headdresses: The case of kingfisher jewelery
Kingfisher jewelry is a Chinese craft characterized by an inlay technique using kingfisher feathers. The birds’ feathers were used to create a piece of jewelry that has abstracted the material to the degree that it becomes unrecognizable as feathers to the uninitiated. We follow the path of the birds from Southeast Asia to their trade as commodities in the Qing dynasty, where they were transformed into eye-catching headdresses. The object journey continues to Europe, where they were turned into things on display. This transformation from an object in use to a thing on display is called "productive estrangement" in thing theory. The thing is illuminated in new ways. But what about the animal that facilitated the material basis? This talk introduces different perspectives on the case of the kingfisher in Chinese craft history. From the ecological history of the bird trade, an avenue of study initiated by Robert Ptak and Wang Lianming; to laments on conservation by a late 19th century collector; to acts of wildlife protection by the Chinese government in the 21st century.
Fan Lin and Doreen Mueller, Picturing Animals and Plants in Early Modern China and Japan: Innovation, Experiments, and Anxieties
The seven articles in this edited volume address the complex meanings that visual representations of plants and animals gained in early modern China and Japan. They aim to understand animals and plants in the new contexts of empirical and epistemological concerns, political and social agendas, and cultural interests. In particular, they examine the ways in which scholars, professional painters, and publishers engendered the sociohistorical meanings of the images.
Ewa Machotka, Mapping the Unrepresentable: Disaster in Japanese Early Modern Visual Culture
This talk critically explores the artistic practices involved in visualizing disasters in early-modern Japan, focusing on the interplay between representation and unrepresentability within printed visual culture. Unlike contemporary disaster imagery, which often transforms catastrophic events into spectacles of human and natural suffering—frequently sensationalized as "disaster porn" for mass consumption—early-modern Japanese prints provide an alternative approach. Whether depicting or deliberately omitting events like earthquakes, fires, floods, and famines, they challenge the universalist logic that underpins modern "emergency imaginary" (Calhoun 2010). By mapping these visual presences and absences, the talk explores the relationships between disaster imagery and social practices. Additionally, it considers the role of non-anthropogenic factors, such as environmental history, in shaping visual culture, and how this perspective might revise understanding of art historiography.
Fumiko Kobayashi, Connecting pictures of mountains-and-water and pictures of birds-and-flowers: The popularization of Chinese literati culture in early nineteenth-century Japan
At the turn of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of picture books depicting idealized rural landscapes featuring mountains, streams or lakes (sansuiga) were produced. Most of these images were done in Chinese-style literati painting (nanga/bunjinga) by literati artists and ukiyo-e artists dabbling in the literati mode such as Kuwagata Keisai and Katsushika Hokusai. The images in these picture books conveyed the taste of Chinese literati culture for enjoying oneself by composing poems or painting in the tranquil countryside. In fact, these picture books include painting manuals for aspiring amateurs seeking to paint landscapes in a literati style. The spread of Chinese literati culture appears to have inspired a boom in ukiyo-e landscape prints from the 1830s onwards. This was also the time when birds-and-flowers (kachō), another important subject of literati-style paintings, emerged as a new subject in ukiyo-e. Harking back to ancient China, the high regard in which literati culture held the enjoyment of country life and of living in nature was widely shared among intellectuals in East Asia. Although these intellectuals largely hailed from privileged social and/or intellectual backgrounds in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Japan, their backgrounds became more diverse in the nineteenth century. Literati culture and its appreciation of nature continued even after the start of the modernizing process in the Meiji Period. Considering the value of nature in literati culture can provide valuable insights for the twenty-first century.
Ying Zhang, Nature in Confinement: A Ming Case Study
How did jailed literati in Ming China experience “nature”? Did confinement change their appreciation of artworks that depict nature? How were animals registered in their everyday life? How did their identification with plants and birds shape their relationship with jailors? In this presentation, Ying Zhang will use examples from Ming prison writings to show a range of engagements with the environment among literati inmates, and think about the religious implications of the sensory impact of confinement.
Harriet Zurndorfer, Burmese Bells, Sexual Agency, and Gender in Asia: The Reminiscences of the Florentine Merchant Francesco Carletti (1573–1636) in Ragionamenti del mio viaggio intorno al mondo [Chronicles of my voyage around the world]
The travel chronicles kept by Francesco Carletti (1573-1636), a Florentine slave merchant and the first private individual to circumnavigate the globe, of his eight-year journey (1594-1602) are a rich source of information about Africa, Central and South America, and Asia (including the Philippines, Japan, Macao, Malacca, and Goa). For all these places he offers meticulous accounts of the flora and fauna he beholds, the local cuisines he experiences, and the perils and pleasures of ocean navigation in the early modern era. But what make Carletti’s record extraordinary are his reports about the sexuality of the peoples he observes in Asia. While he offers no visual evidence, he writes in detail about the practice of Asian men purposely piercing their genitalia to insert tiny bells or thin metal studs to gratify their female sexual partners in the act of intercourse. Thereby Carletti confirms what earlier European travelers had already discovered: the dominance of women’s agency in Asia—a man without the bells could not expect to acquire a wife. This presentation explores how Carletti’s Ragionamenti provides evidence of a particular phase in European perceptions of peoples of different regions in the sexual arena before Western political and economic hegemony took over much of the globe and denigrated the freedom of sexual expression in diverse cultures outside EuroAmerica.