“A Sort of Picture or Image of My Self”: Amoy Chin Qua's Almost Ancestral Portrait of Joseph Collet
It was 1716 and the British East India Company merchant Joseph Collet (1673– 1725) found himself at a crossroads that had brought him from the “lowest depth of adversity” to “an eminent height of prosperity.” He was departing the English East India Company’s Fort Marlborough at Bencoolen (present-day Bengkulu City in Sumatra) for Fort St. George at Madras (present-day Chennai), where he would soon ascend to the Presidency of the Madras Council, one of the most lucrative of the Company’s positions in the East. That was the prosperity he could look forward to, if a little sardonically. For the adversity that brought him to this point was the sudden death of his eighteen-year-old son, John, who had joined him in Bencoolen after years of effort but died of malaria after only a month after his arrival. Such was Collet’s despair that personal letters to his family ceased for nearly a year.
In Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century, 2023
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Not Exactly the Same: On the Fantasy of “Chinese Architectural Copies”
In 1755, at the height of the European mania for chinoiserie, a British employee of the Swedish East India Company named William Chambers returned to England after three voyages to the port of Guangzhou, China. Leveraging his firsthand experience of China and a subsequent five years in Rome and Paris, Chambers would fashion himself into the leading establishment architect and landscape designer of the day, Architect to King George III, Master Surveyor, and first Treasurer of the Royal Academy of Art. In the 1760s, Chambers designed the Chinese Pagoda (Figure 12.1) and the House of Confucius for the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, for which trees and flowers from all climes and soils were sought, and the architectural styles of the ancient civilizations rebuilt in a veritable encyclopedia of the natural and built world.
in Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange
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Shenzhen’s Model Bohemia and the Creative China Dream
In 1999, culture and propaganda officials in Shenzhen’s Buji Township (later redesignated Street Office) learned from a Guangzhou newspaper of the existence of an “artists’ village” right under their noses. According to the article, Dafen Village, then a rural village located outside the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) border checkpoint in an otherwise undistinguished and impoverished district (Longgang), was home to a large and thriving community where oil painters were working, living, and selling their artwork to buyers in Europe and America. In the wake of the sudden international success of Beijing’s East Village and 798, artists’ villages on the outskirts of Beijing where Chinese artists had gained the attention of influential foreign collectors and curators, Shenzhen officials saw in Dafen Village a rare opportunity to put the city on the cultural map.
in Learning from Shenzhen, 2017
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Speculative Authorship in the City of Fakes
In this paper I examine, on the one hand, an urban rumor about the city of Shenzhen, China, circulated within Hong Kong and American public and popular media, and, on the other, rumors within European and American scientific communities about scientific authorship at the world’s largest genomics sequencing firm, which also happens to be located in that same city. I describe two sets of rumors connected to each other by themes of surveillance, science, technology, bodily leisure, and intellectual labor and simply locate them at the site that is their subject. In so doing, I aim not only to falsify cultural imaginaries about this Chinese city and its dystopian reputation as the “city of fakes” in global public culture but also to examine how and why this site so productively spawns gradations of the truth- value and illicitness, attending to the particular configurations of “fact” and human capital that this city, as a site of technologized bioproduction, inaugurates.
in Current Anthropology, 58, 2017
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“Time is Money, Efficiency is Life”
So declares one of the oldest propaganda slogans in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. Put up on a simple painted billboard in the 1980s in one of the first industrial zones created after the death of Mao, the slogan docu- ments the exciting and radical nature of the reinvention of the political economy of China in the early years of Reform. Back in the 1980s, it was a slogan that proudly promised the opportunity to transform time, value, and social relations as China emerged out of central planning and into a market-economy mode of life. It summarized the spirit by which a whole new city and its integration with the global capitalist system was con- structed—when construction teams proudly declared they could build tall buildings at the speed of ‘‘three stories a day.’’
in representations, 136, 2016
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Lantern Slide Moments and the Taught Subject, 1906 and 2006
Lu Xun’s lantern slide moment looms large in the history of modern China. As is well known, it occurred when Lu Xun was a student at the Sendai Medical Academy in Japan between 1904 and 1906. As Lu Xun tells it, he had nurtured the dream of becoming a Western medical doctor since the premature death of his father, whose life traditional Chinese medicine had failed to save. At the time, microbiology lectures were delivered using instructional images projected by a slide lantern in the classroom, and when there was extra time at the end of each class, the students were shown slides of scenic landscapes or current affairs. These included reportage images of Japanese victories in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, which Lu Xun, as the only Chinese student in the room, said he felt obliged to join his Japanese classmates in applauding.
in positions: asia critique, 23:1, 2015
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Who authors and owns a space? Who authors and owns its appearances and sensations? Who, in turn, has the right to preserve or transform it? Disputes over the authorship and ownership of architectural design in the realm of intellectual property law can give us indications of the limits of these questions, or at least illuminate one important battleground on which they can be contested. In 1990, under the obligations of the Berne Convention, American copyright protection was extended to architectural works for the first time. Under the act, a Yale University architecture student, Thomas Shine, sued David Childs, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
in Future Anterior, 9:1, 2012
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The Panda Man and the Anti-Counterfeiting Hero: Art, Activism, and Appropriation in Contemporary China
In 1999, a cute and colorful series of posters was seen throughout Beijing’s underground subway system, and soon after, in international art venues from the Guangzhou Triennial to the Venice Biennale. One of the posters depicted the Chinese performance artist, Zhao Bandi, cartoonishly dressed as a detective and protectively clutching a stuffed panda doll (Figure 1). It featured comic-strip style speech bubbles, through which the Little Panda asks, ‘Are they clones of me?’ The detective, gazing wide-eyed through a large magnifying glass, answers, ‘No, they are fakes!’
in Journal of Visual Culture, 11:1, 2012
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The Unskilled Migrant
Marcel Duchamp’s last painting, Tu m’, features a hand painted by a commercial sign painter named ‘A. Klang,’ whom Duchamp had hired to execute the illusionistic detail. By paying another painter to paint a hand whose forefinger points at the vanishing point of a canvas--upon which the shadows of earlier readymades are cast, Tu m’ summons together a gamut of artistic skills, labour, and materials, and recirculates them within a painted history of Duchamp’s own oeuvre.
in Third Text Asia, 4, 2010
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Framed Authors: Photography and Conceptual Art from Dafen Village
Originality is central to modernity’s artistic practices as well as its commercial ones. Through originality, artistic developments are marked, creativity is recognized, and innovation commodified. Yet it is through copies that we consume the original, and, hence, to tell the story of an original object is also to tell micro-histories of its multiple, repeatable, and dis-singular origins. Since 1989, Dafen village, located outside the border of China’s Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, has been the global production center for handmade oil paintings, supplying Western consumer markets with mass-produced copies of paintings sourced from the Western canon. More recently, assisted by governmental policies promoting cultural industries, Dafen’s painters, entrepreneurs, and administrators have embarked upon a transition towards original and creative production. The drama of originality and the copy play out in the scene set by today’s Dafen village.
in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 7:4, 2008
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