Thammasat University students interested in China, France, media and communications studies, sociology, art, literature, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 8 April Zoom webinar introducing a new free Open Access book on Paris and the Art of Transposition: Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters.

The event, on Monday, 8 April 2024 at 9am Bangkok time, is presented by the School of Humanities, Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures and Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, Hong Kong University (HKU).

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of Chinese-French interactions.

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=93083

For further information or with any questions, please write to

gchallen@hku.hk

The Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at HKU explains that

The focus of its work is on issues of culture and globalization with special reference to Asia, China and Hong Kong. Major research themes include: the cultures of capitalism; global flows of culture, media and technology; cities and globalization; new communities, publics, and identities; and postcolonialism and neo-liberalism. Research Profile

The research aims of the Center are:

• to provide a site where inter-faculty, inter-departmental, and inter-institutional collaborations can take place
• to stimulate research and publications by faculty members and graduate students
• to facilitate student and staff exchanges with major universities abroad and to secure a strong international network with other research institutes
• to make the interdisciplinary study of culture and globalization into an “area of excellence”
• to promote teaching and learning in the study of globalization and cultures.

According to the event webpage:

A brief stay in France was a vital stepping stone for many Chinese political leaders during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For Chinese students who went abroad to study Western art and literature however, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, “Paris and the Art of Transposition” (University of Michigan Press, 2023) uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art.

The speaker will be Assistant Professor Angie Chau, who teaches Chinese literature and film at the University of Victoria, Canada.

The event moderator: will be Assistant Professor Alvin K. Wong of the  Department of Comparative Literature, HKU.

Professor Chau’s book is an Open Access title available for free download at this link:

https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/bn999927n

The publisher’s website notes:

While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary and visual artwork of five artists who moved between France and China: the painter Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, the painter Pan Yuliang, and the writer Xu Xu. Chau draws the idea of transposition from music theory where it refers to shifting music from one key or clef to another, or to adapting a song originally composed for one instrument to be played by another. Transposing transposition to the study of art and literature, Chau uses the term to describe a fluid and strategic art practice that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old, celebrating both novelty and recognition—a process that occurs when a text gets placed into a fresh context.

Professor Chau’s book states that

Scholarly studies of Republican-era cultural production have conventionally focused on Shanghai, where a flourishing publishing industry and growing consumer culture contributed to a hybridized and transcultural semicolonial urban space.

Shifting the discussion of Chinese aesthetic modernism from Shanghai to the setting of Paris, this book reveals the impact of cultural displacement on artistic production, by asking, What was the role of modern art in promoting intercultural understanding—and misunderstanding—among Chinese intellectuals and the West in the early twentieth century?

More specifically, what kinds of expectations did Chinese writers and artists face in Paris, the city described as “the capital of the literary world, the city endowed with the greatest prestige on earth”? And what images of the modern Chinese artist circulated in China and France as a result of these encounters? Rethinking these cross-cultural encounters through the lens of transposition permits us to assign value to forms of artistic engagement that have slipped through the cracks.

My book bridges the fields of Chinese and French literary and art histories, by revealing how, through the circulation of diverse images of the artist, Paris served as a site of negotiation where Chinese artists and writers were motivated to emphasize recognizable aspects of Chinese culture and identity, or “Chineseness”—an imaginary concept whose contours became at once more pressing as a way to represent China to the rest of the world, and also more flexible and susceptible to experimentation outside of China. This book aims to shed light on the experiences of Chinese writers and artists in Paris by tracing the multitude of representations of the modern Chinese artist, produced both by themselves for an increasingly global audience and also in dialogue with images of the artist that circulated in literature and other forms of popular media. The five modern literary and artistic figures of my project were chosen on the basis of how they positioned themselves to varying degrees as being politically detached from the larger revolutionary project of national salvation. At the same time, they were deeply invested in their respective roles as cultural middlemen between the West and their place of origin in China, an honorary status bestowed upon them due to their overseas experience.

But in some ways they were venturing down a path that had been paved earlier by late Qing wenren (scholar) travelers to France in the late nineteenth century, such as the translator Wang Tao (1828–97) and the diplomat Chen Jitong (1851–1907) […]

In contrast to Wang Tao and Chen Jitong, the young Chinese students in this book belonged to the next generation of travelers who considered themselves members of an intellectual class whose relevance in modern Chinese society was being called into question in the 1920s. During a period of significant cultural transformations and political upheaval until the 1940s, as the boundaries between the binaries of race and ethnicity (white vs. Asian, Chinese vs. French), gender roles (male vs. female), and temporal modalities (modern vs. traditional) grew increasingly blurred, France became a site for Chinese intellectuals to experiment with new and creative forms of self-expression.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)