Scholars have long noticed how the ‘Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Walter Benjamin), following the invention of lithography, revolutionised the practice of art and its consumption in late-Qing China. However, few scholars have paid attention to copperplate printing, which was introduced to Shanghai commercially almost at the same time.
The “Image complex” lecture series proposes that the history of power in the United States can be told as a history of visual infrastructures: institutions and practices that govern how we perceive, and what we can do.
Archives collectively address our alternating visual expectations and provoke new dialogues on the notion of a stable or authentic discourse.
The first lecture in the 2020 Sydney Asian Art Series. Delivered on Thursday, 17 September 2020.
To open the series, we welcome scholar Lisa Claypool, who will lecture on the theme of the “technological sublime” in the 1960s work of Chinese painter Fu Baoshi. In conjunction with this lecture, we will be hosting a special screening of Zhao Liang’s acclaimed 2015 film, Behemoth, with a short introduction by Lisa Claypool.
The history of power in the United States can be told as a history of visual infrastructures: institutions and practices that govern how we perceive, and what we can do.
We can think of design as an inherently anticipatory process. This lecture explores how a history of exhibitionary architecture that starts in the 1970s in China and abroad contributed to the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to reposition itself relative to the world at large.
Part of the 2019 Sydney Asian Art Series.
In May 2019, Malini Guha (Carleton University) presented a talk entitled ‘Kolkata ‘Rising’: The Politics of Place in Recent Bengali Cinema’ as part of the Sydney Asian Art Series.
In March 2019, Sussan Babaie (The Courtauld Institute) presented a talk entitled ‘Seeing Taste: Art, Cuisine and Urbanity in Safavid Persia/Iran’ as part of the Sydney Asian Art Series.
