Events

A Symposium in Conjunction with the Exhibition Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Disorienting urban transformation, boundless enthusiasm for new technologies and cultures, increased international trade, and rising geopolitical tensions: these circumstances defined Japan’s Meiji era (1868-1912) as much as they describe our own. Taken together with the final decade of the Tokugawa shoguns’ regime, in which Yokohama and other ports opened to direct trade with the US and other nations, this period constitutes “fifty years of new Japan.”

The phrase “fifty years of new Japan” was used by Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu in a book meant to look back on the nation’s progress since kaikoku, literally, the “opening of the country” to global trade, representative government, and unprecedented freedom of expression. While the changes wrought upheaval and uncertainty, many people, including artists, saw the Meiji period as a time of new possibilities and aspirations, global exchange, and progress. Against this backdrop, art emerged as one of Japan’s most profitable industries and a singular means of representing the modern nation-state: in Japan and abroad, art filled international expositions, domestic halls of industry, and private residences. These objects embodied the civic ambitions of Japanese artists and politicians, showcased Japan’s manufacturing capabilities, and displayed the unparalleled skill and sensibility of individual artists who enjoyed recognition on the world stage for the first time.

This symposium brings together leading scholars of Meiji art and culture from the United States, Great Britain, and Japan in order to reevaluate an artistic period described in terms of both continuity and change, westernization and the invention of Japanese tradition.

SCHEDULE

Saturday, May 4

International House, Assembly Hall (1414 E. 59th St.) 9:00 am - 6:00 pm (order and schedule TBD)

Speaker Listing Bradley Bailey, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Michael Bourdaghs, University of Chicago Mami Hatayama, Roger L. Weston Foundation Meghen Jones, Alfred University Andreas Marks, Minneapolis Institute of Art Alison Miller, University of the South Rhiannon Paget, Ringling Museum of Art Eriko Tomizawa-Kay, University of Michigan Alice Tseng, Boston University Takurō Tsunoda, Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Art

TO VIEW THE FULL SCHEDULE, CLICK HERE.

SPONSORS

This program is co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies (with generous support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education), the Smart Museum of Art, the Center for the Art of East Asia, and the International House Global Voices Program at the University of Chicago.

ACCESSIBILITY

Persons with disabilities who may need assistance should contact International House in advance of the program at (773) 753-2274 or email: i-house-programs@uchicago.edu

A Symposium in Conjunction with the Exhibition Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Disorienting urban transformation, boundless enthusiasm for new technologies and cultures, increased international trade, and rising geopolitical tensions: these circumstances defined Japan’s Meiji era (1868-1912) as much as they describe our own. Taken together with the final decade of the Tokugawa shoguns’ regime, in which Yokohama and other ports opened to direct trade with the US and other nations, this period constitutes “fifty years of new Japan.”

The phrase “fifty years of new Japan” was used by Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu in a book meant to look back on the nation’s progress since kaikoku, literally, the “opening of the country” to global trade, representative government, and unprecedented freedom of expression. While the changes wrought upheaval and uncertainty, many people, including artists, saw the Meiji period as a time of new possibilities and aspirations, global exchange, and progress. Against this backdrop, art emerged as one of Japan’s most profitable industries and a singular means of representing the modern nation-state: in Japan and abroad, art filled international expositions, domestic halls of industry, and private residences. These objects embodied the civic ambitions of Japanese artists and politicians, showcased Japan’s manufacturing capabilities, and displayed the unparalleled skill and sensibility of individual artists who enjoyed recognition on the world stage for the first time.

This symposium brings together leading scholars of Meiji art and culture from the United States, Great Britain, and Japan in order to reevaluate an artistic period described in terms of both continuity and change, westernization and the invention of Japanese tradition.

SCHEDULE

Saturday, May 4

International House, Assembly Hall (1414 E. 59th St.)
9:00 am - 6:00 pm (order and schedule TBD)

Speaker Listing
Bradley Bailey, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Michael Bourdaghs, University of Chicago
Mami Hatayama, Roger L. Weston Foundation
Meghen Jones, Alfred University
Andreas Marks, Minneapolis Institute of Art
Alison Miller, University of the South
Rhiannon Paget, Ringling Museum of Art
Eriko Tomizawa-Kay, University of Michigan
Alice Tseng, Boston University
Takurō Tsunoda, Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Art

TO VIEW THE FULL SCHEDULE, CLICK HERE.

SPONSORS

This program is co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies (with generous support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education), the Smart Museum of Art, the Center for the Art of East Asia, and the International House Global Voices Program at the University of Chicago.

ACCESSIBILITY

Persons with disabilities who may need assistance should contact International House in advance of the program at (773) 753-2274 or email: i-house-programs@uchicago.edu

How much work does it take to make art seem effortless, the laboring body absent? Works By attempts to answer this question by bringing together four Chicago-based artists who share an interest in the many meanings of “labor.” The centerpiece of the exhibition is a floor drawing by Tony Lewis, performatively produced on site. A sculpture by Devin T. Mays features pallets collected during his wanderings around Chicago’s South Side. Erased: (Unrelated), a 2012 photograph by Bethany Collins, captures a cloud of chalk dust released into a black void—the remnants of the word “unrelated” repeatedly written on a blackboard and then erased. A large photo by Ellen Rothenberg depicts a work boot; another captures a giant lump of crumpled paper that was once a Barbara Kruger mural. The fruits of these artists’ labors will be on view from May 1 (International Workers’ Day) through July 14 (Bastille Day)—two dates that commemorate landmark events in the history of the working class.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.

May 6, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Platform Economies: Beyond the North-South Divide Dr. Janet Roitman RMIT University

ABSTRACT: Platform economies are depicted as the foundation for a new era of economic production. This transpires through the incorporation of digital technologies and algorithmic operations into the heart of economic and financial practices. However, different assumptions are made about the effects of digital platforms depending on geographical location. While digital platforms are approached as inherent to processes of financialization globally, they are reduced to processes of financial inclusion when referencing the ‘Global South.’ Analyses of financialization as a one-way-vector – Global North to Global South – overlook variability and the limits to financialization. In contrast, a focus on market devices illustrates the fault lines of value creation that are obscured by the Global North/Global South frame.

BIOGRAPHY: Janet Roitman is Professor at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Australia). She is Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, an associate member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-making and Society (ADM+S), and founder-director of The Platform Economies Research Network (PERN). Her research focuses on the anthropology of value and emergent forms of the political. She is the author of Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton University Press) and Anti-Crisis (Duke University Press). She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cultural Economy, Cultural Anthropology, Finance & Society, and Platforms & Society. Her research has received support from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, The Institute for Public Knowledge, and The National Science Foundation. 

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Roitman’s talk.

Lisa Kahn, University of Rochester Topic: TBA

We cordially invite you to join us next *Monday*, May 6, at 4:45-6:45pm CT for a special virtual-only session. Please register for zoom access here. This workshop features:

Feng Schöneweiß

Postdoctoral Fellow, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Provenance, Memory, and Transcultural Monumentality: Chinese Monumental Vase as ‘national wertvolles Kulturgut’ in German Cultural History, 1717–2019”

Abstract

The concept of cultural heritage in modern nation states is often associated with the connotation of the national. From the perspectives of global art history and transcultural studies, how to understand the accumulation of national significance in the formation of transcultural heritage? This paper addresses the merging conceptual dichotomy by a case study of transcultural monumentality. It examines how one of the so-called Dragoon Vases (Dragonervasen), large blue-and-white porcelain jars with lids made in Jingdezhen in circa 1690, became a cultural property of national significance (national wertvolles Kulturgut), the highest level of cultural heritage defined by Cultural Property Protection Act (Kulturgutschutzgesetz) in Germany. Based on a survey and typology of Chinese monumental vases (chinesische Monumentalvasen), a period term invented by museum professionals at the Dresden Porcelain Collection around 1900, the paper investigates the identity-forming impact of both the vases and their provenance on the eighteenth-century Porcelain-Regiment of Prussia, the baroque locality of Dresden in the eyes of travelers, generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German museum professionals, and the institutional identity of the collection. Substantiated with archives, inventories, architectural and exhibition designs, photography, and manuscripts in Dresden, the paper argues that the provenance of the Chinese vases, rather than their extraordinary materiality, embedded the global objects in the local cultural memory that contextualized the transculturation of heritage.

Bio: Feng Schöneweiß is an art historian of ecocritical and transcultural perspectives. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the 4A_Lab, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Planck-Institut (KHI) in cooperation with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. 

How much work does it take to make art seem effortless, the laboring body absent? Works By attempts to answer this question by bringing together four Chicago-based artists who share an interest in the many meanings of “labor.” The centerpiece of the exhibition is a floor drawing by Tony Lewis, performatively produced on site. A sculpture by Devin T. Mays features pallets collected during his wanderings around Chicago’s South Side. Erased: (Unrelated), a 2012 photograph by Bethany Collins, captures a cloud of chalk dust released into a black void—the remnants of the word “unrelated” repeatedly written on a blackboard and then erased. A large photo by Ellen Rothenberg depicts a work boot; another captures a giant lump of crumpled paper that was once a Barbara Kruger mural. The fruits of these artists’ labors will be on view from May 1 (International Workers’ Day) through July 14 (Bastille Day)—two dates that commemorate landmark events in the history of the working class.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.

On Tuesday, May 7, 2024, the Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse and the Chicago Center on Democracy will host Marco Geuna, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Milan, to present a paper on the theme of the “common good” in Machiavelli’s writings and how it connects to the modern Republican tradition.

Please join us at 12pm for a lunchtime conversation with Professor Geuna about this paper, in room 408 of Wieboldt Hall (1050 E 59th St).

Please RSVP so we can assure we order enough lunch.

Raffaele Saggio - University of British Columbia

Jacopo Perego, Columbia Business School Topic: TBA