The ideological suppositions, images, and fantasy associated with orientalism has given rise to the conceptualization of a materialist “feminine orientalism.” The term refers to an historical moment in the early twentieth century when white women in Europe and North America defined their social roles and gender by appropriating male orientalist politics and ideology. This article challenges the concept of “feminine orientalism” through the study of the prints and travel writing of two modern graphic artists who sojourned in Republican-era Peiping in the 1920s and 1930s: Bertha Lum and Elizabeth Keith. Through close formal analysis of the new visions of Peiping that the two women conjured in their prints – a vision that relied as heavily on urban ethnography as it did on fantasy – it proposes an alternative concept of “modern enchantment” as a heuristic device to interpret gender. Drawing from Wolfgang Iser’s notions of the “fictive,” “modern enchantment” lays as much weight on Weberian modern rationality as it does on imagination, and critically functions as a means to recuperate cultural boundary crossing in female gender performance and construction.

This paper explores the uneasy position of painting in an early twentieth-century Shanghai publication, the National Essence Journal (Guocui xuebao, 1905–11), published by the prominent and influential Society for Preservation of National Learning (Guoxue baocunhui). The publication is like international expositions and museums in peculiar ways; the Chinese paintings in it, devoted to the nation, are paradoxically invisible. In the article I explore how and why, establishing the ways in which painting was newly understood to matter in the modern era.

How do pictures make the world? In 1907 the Chinese fiction writer and social critic Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936) essayed the thought that making the world depended on attunement towards beauty’s emotional vibrancy and on an imaginative frequency to scientific thought, both. This curatorial project asks after pictures made mostly during Lu Xun’s lifetime, in turn-of-the-century China, mostly by brush-and-ink painters, but also by embroiderers, photographers, cartoonists, taxidermists, map-makers, and others who worked self-consciously within the arts and sciences, popular or academic. Their pictures carry within them their own struggles with the rationalities of science, as well as emotions and imagination, to make the world. Still, as curators of each of the six thematic sections of the exhibition observe, the pictures also escape the hands of their makers; they are thrown back into the flow of time through the questions they pose of us now, questions that we hope will prompt us to see and sense nature and each other differently, and in doing so, to make our own world from a newly aware and nuanced perspective.

No abstract

No abstract