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

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. 

“Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland”

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

Tuesday, May 7 - 5:00 pm

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, 5751 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

Part of the East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Series, Ruth Rogaski uncovers how natural knowledge, and the nature of Manchuria itself – a site of war and environmental extremes - have changed over time, from a sacred “land where the dragon arose” to a global epicenter of contagious disease; from a tragic “wasteland” to an abundant granary that nurtured the hope of a nation. Hear Professor Rogaski talk about her book “Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland” (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

This event is co-sponsored with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.

“Towers in the Void: Li Yu and Early Modern Chinese Media”

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

Wednesday, May 8 · 5:00 pm

Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, IL 60637

Part of the East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks series, the University of Michigan’s S.E. Kile discusses his book that argues that the maverick cultural entrepreneur, Li Yu’s cultural experimentation exploits the seams between language and the tangible world. He draws attention to the materiality of particular media forms, expanding the scope of early modern media by interweaving books, buildings, and bodies. Within and across these media, Li Yu’s cultural entrepreneurship with the technology of the printed book embraced its reproducibility while retaining a personal touch. His literary practice informed his garden design and, conversely, he drew on garden design to transform the vernacular short story. Ideas for extreme body modification in Li Yu’s fiction remade the possibilities of real human bodies in his nonfiction writing. Towers in the Void calls for seeing books, bodies, and buildings as interlinked media forms, both in early modern China and in today’s media-saturated world, positioning the Ming and Qing as a crucial site of global early modern cultural change.

This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.

Classroom Visit with Prof. Mihaela M. Mihailova Sponsored by CEAS

Prof. Thomas Lamarre’s Class: Japanese Animation: The Making of a Global Media

May 9, 2024, 12:30 pm

Logan Center for the Arts, Room 201, 915 E. 60^th St.

Please Join to hear Prof. Mihaela M. Mihailova speak about “Generative AI and Anime Production “ Thursday, May 9, at 12:3 pm US CT.

This class lecture will reflect on emerging applications of generative AI tools in the anime and manga industries. It will examine the aesthetic and production approaches seen in (in)famous recent examples, such as the short film The Dog and the Boy (Ryotaro Makihara, 2023), which features partially AI-generated backgrounds, and the manga Cyberpunk Momotaro (Rootport, 2023), which was produced with the Midjourney software. The talk will discuss the public reception of such works and the debates they have inspired in their respective industries, with a particular emphasis on questions of authorship, creativity, and creative workers’ rights. AI’s entry into Japanese media spaces will not be treated as an isolated phenomenon; instead, it will be discussed in the broader context of an ongoing global push towards the automation of skilled animation labor.

Mihaela Mihailova is an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021). She has published in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Velvet Light Trap,Convergence: TheInternational Journal ofResearch into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, [in]Transition,Flow, and Kino Kultura. Dr. Mihailova is the co-editor of the open-access journal Animation Studies and the co-president of the Society for Animation Studies. Her current book project, Synthetic Creativity: Deepfakes in Contemporary Media, was recently awarded an NEH grant.

This classroom visit is 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.

“Epistemology of the Violets, or Do Black Lives Still Matter for Asian Studies?”

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

Thursday, May 9, 2024 - 5 pm

Joseph Regenstein Library, Room 122 1100 E. 57th St. Chicago, IL 60637

Part of the CEAS Lecture Series, this lecture is co-sponsored with the University of Chicago Library and features University of Rochester’s Will Bridges. This talk is interested in the formation of what we might call an epistemology of the violets, or that way of seeing and being in the world at the intersection of the blues and the reds, with “red” here serving as a chromatic stand in for the epistemological and sensorial insights embedded in Japanese creative works. To date, Afro-Japanese scholarship has been framed primarily by concepts such as representation and reception. While informative in their own way, such frameworks prime us to think about transferences from one culture (“blues”) to another (“reds”). Addressing collaborations such as the artwork produced by Pharrell Williams and Murakami Takashi, this talk provides general heuristics for those interested in the study of the epistemological possibilities of purple, or a way of seeing and creating possible worlds that is neither red nor blue—neither African American nor Japanese—but both red and blue, the emergence upon their coalescence. Given the possibility of this new way of seeing the world, I argue that black lives matter to Asian Studies unconditionally. What might an Asian Studies that cultivates black epistemologies unconditionally look like? Will Bridges is the Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities, Associate Professor of Japanese, and Core Faculty member of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester.

Ecological Thought and Practice Across the Disciplines

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

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Ecology has become a subject of increasing concern among social and natural scientists in Japan as a result of climate change and disaster management. At the same time, the trend toward specialization of fields in university programs has made it rare for researchers in the social and natural sciences to meet and share ideas, let alone work together in the field. This symposium responds to this dilemma by creating a space for dialogue concerning ecology between the natural and social sciences in Japan. Drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Imanishi Kinji, whose research and writings bridged practice and theory, this group aims to develop an interdisciplinary conversation on topics related to ecology and the natural environment in Japan. To this end, the symposium brings together researchers from the social sciences and natural sciences.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Friday, May 10 | 10:00 am-5:30 PM | Venue: Joseph Regenstein Library, Room 122 (1100 E. 57th Street, Chicago, IL 60637)

[A reception will be held upon the conclusion of the event and will be open to all registrants]

PHOTOGRAPHY/VIDEOGRAPHY

Please note that there may be photography taken during this educational event by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies for archival and publicity purposes. By attending this event, participants are confirming their permission to be photographed and the University of Chicago’s right to use, distribute, copy, and edit the recordings in any form of media for non-commercial, educational purposes, and to grant rights to third parties to do any of the foregoing.

Ecological Thought and Practice Across the Disciplines

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

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Ecology has become a subject of increasing concern among social and natural scientists in Japan as a result of climate change and disaster management. At the same time, the trend toward specialization of fields in university programs has made it rare for researchers in the social and natural sciences to meet and share ideas, let alone work together in the field. This symposium responds to this dilemma by creating a space for dialogue concerning ecology between the natural and social sciences in Japan. Drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Imanishi Kinji, whose research and writings bridged practice and theory, this group aims to develop an interdisciplinary conversation on topics related to ecology and the natural environment in Japan. To this end, the symposium brings together researchers from the social sciences and natural sciences.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Saturday, May 11 | 10:00 am- 12:00 PM | Venue: Franke Institute for the Humanities, located inside the Joseph Regenstein Library (1100 E. 57th Street, Chicago, IL 60637)

PHOTOGRAPHY/VIDEOGRAPHY

Please note that there may be photography taken during this educational event by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies for archival and publicity purposes. By attending this event, participants are confirming their permission to be photographed and the University of Chicago’s right to use, distribute, copy, and edit the recordings in any form of media for non-commercial, educational purposes, and to grant rights to third parties to do any of the foregoing.

“Homesick Blues: Politics, Protest, and Musical Storytelling in Modern Japan”

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

Tuesday, May 14, 5 pm

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, 5751 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

Part of the East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks series, an initiative that is partnered with the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Scott W. Aalgaard from Wesleyan University will talk about Homesick Blues explores how artists, fans, amateur practitioners, and others have used music to tell stories of everyday life in Japan from the late 1940s to 2018, a practice that the book calls ‘musical storytelling.’  In Homesick Blues, author Scott Aalgaard assembles a diverse ensemble of voices, some of whom are now appearing in English-language scholarship for the very first time, including industry stakeholders, rock stars, fans, newscasters, Kyoto-based “protest folk” singers, jazz singers, karaoke enthusiasts and even US military personnel.