Lisa Claypool | University of Alberta (original) (raw)
Papers by Lisa Claypool
This article maps the ways that the arts of the brush are being conscripted at the 2010 Shanghai ... more This article maps the ways that the arts of the brush are being conscripted at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo to define the Chinese state's vision of an ideal city. Calling them "boundary forms" that support the logic and rationality of the state-promoted urban grid map, it asks how calligraphy and ink painting might also slip through those grid map boundaries toward something invisible and unmappable. The article draws upon Jean-François Lyotard's conception of ideological practices in the supermodern age of technological reproducibility and takes Cai Guo-Qiang's concurrent exhibition at the Shanghai Rockbund Museum as an immediate and relevant means of questioning the brush line's status at the Expo. Rather than demanding a politics of deconstruction or a radical response which would only replicate, or mirror obliquely, the state's ideological and economic agendas for urban construction and development, the paper considers the fugitive morphologies of ink that prevent it from being reduced to formulaic propaganda and instead open up new ways-inarticulate and idiosyncratically felt-of thinking about and seeing the city. Keywords Mediasphere. Calligraphy. Propaganda. Urban development. Exhibition culture The 2010 Shanghai World Expo in the southeastern precincts of the city is a distinctive space that possesses walls, gates, entrance tickets, and its own internal design logic that draws it away from its immediate surroundings and towards the national cultures on display from around the globe. Yet the obvious physical boundaries of the Expo don't begin to explain the way it is circumscribed differently from the city by history, by video and electronic technology, and by its rhetorical ambition to tackle what cities might become. Still, these are a complicated set of boundaries: If world expositions have historically limned a line between the local and the rest of the world, so, too, has Shanghai: once the "Paris of the East" and a treaty port, today it is home to roughly 19 million residents and 4.5 million sojourners (from migrant workers to foreign expatriates). 1 Then, too, the Expo exists not only in metric but in virtual forms; its boundaries extended by our capacity to see three dimensions in two, both on video displayed at
A s cities in China expand at a rate and to a size practically beyond belief, the language that w... more A s cities in China expand at a rate and to a size practically beyond belief, the language that we use to describe and define them is shifting. Words such as "metropolis," "cosmopolis," and even "urban" seem inadequate, not grand enough or encompassing enough to represent the enormity of this new intersection of rice fields and skyscrapers. They are being supplanted by the new language of polylocality, the "glocal," and terms such as "translocalmotion," the theme of the 2008 Shanghai Biennial, a word that evokes the powerful machinery of train locomotion, movement across space, and locality. It is rendered kuaicheng kuaike in Chinese, literally, "speedy city, speedy guest." In some cases, words that seem new in fact are being resuscitated from long disuse. They draw us back into the nineteenth century, another era of vast construction, migrations of people, and rapid circulation of commodities and capital. The nineteenth century gave birth to the megalopolis, a city without a centre, a space of endless urban sprawl, an inchoate architectural form. If London was the embodiment of the nineteenth-century megalopolis, the Pearl River Delta is its new embodiment in the twenty-first century. The city in China, in short, is so big and is moving so fast that it seems almost able to escape language. And so we find ourselves grasping for words to speak of it. Visual art begins to fill the gap. As an artist whose visual work limns the line between architectural and pictorial space and whose process as a painter and photographer is heavily informed by training in architecture and craft design, Xie Xiaoze is especially well situated to address the problem of the Chinese city. Photographs of his recent installation, Last Days, composed with collaborator
I n the process of painting Stained No. 2 (2009), more literally "ink traces" in Chinese (moji), ... more I n the process of painting Stained No. 2 (2009), more literally "ink traces" in Chinese (moji), Zheng Chongbin writhes across a muralsized eighteen foot length of mulberry paper, in which the shallowness of ink is built up through layers of brushwork, opaque whites, and the imprint of the bricks in the paper upon which it had lain while the artist painted. Slashing brush and pooling ink "vibrates, clenches, or cracks open because it is the bearer of glimpsed forces," to borrow the words of Gilles Deleuze. 1 Water, tissue wrinkles, the deep colouristic black of the ink, the heaviness of a thick acrylic, and a wet smear of brown stain, create organic shapes as well as an architectonic space for contemplation and introspection; they compellingly draw the viewer in. The picture is something so fluid-not framed but "deframed"-that it poses a conundrum: how to locate its space? And what are the stakes of entering into the space of an ink painting? A ready answer is provided, somewhat surprisingly, by the Chinese government. Ink painting had a peculiar presence, for instance, at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. The slogan of the Expo was, "Better City, Better Life," in English, or, in Chinese, "The City makes your life even more perfect!" (chengshi rang shenghuo geng meihao). At the Expo grounds ink painting in state propaganda was most typically presented in video, where montage transformed ink paintings into film sequences. A typical sequence: first mountains and streams appear on the video screen, black ink against white ground. As the brush starts to paint structures not from natural life but from the city-skyscrapers, telephone wires, and smoke stacks-one might be reminded of Socialist-era woodcuts that expressed the energy and might of the city. Unlike those idealized static views of the city, however, in these paintings there is a visual progression as the ground becomes darker with pooled water and ink, and the images start to look like a polluted environment. Out of the blackness a dim photograph of the city-often night scenes in colour, brightened with sparks of neon light-begins to Zheng Chongbin, Stained No. 2 (Moji), 2009, ink and acrylic on xuan paper, 144 x 560 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
How do we see the places we know best? What does it mean when knowledge of a place does not shape... more How do we see the places we know best? What does it mean when knowledge of a place does not shape the way we see it but instead bends under the weight of emotions and memories colouring our view? During the 1950s and 1960s, the ink painter Fu Baoshi (1904-65) quietly reflected on these questions in a group of paintings of famous places in his hometown of Nanjing. One of the words the artist used to describe the strange texture and dynamic to his visual encounters with his painting subjects-the "glance" (yipie 一瞥)-is the focus of this short curatorial essay. Fu Baoshi's "glance" as it is embodied in his landscape paintings challenges academic understanding of the term by revealing its emotional intensity, quality of directness, and, in spite of its heartbeat duration, the way it generates long-lasting impressions. Yet in some respects, the nature of the glance also makes these landscapes hard to see.
The ideological suppositions, images, and fantasy associated with orientalism has given rise to t... more 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 modem 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 "modem enchantment" as a heuristic device to interpret gender. Drawing from Wolfgang Iser's notions of the "Active," "mod em enchantment" lays as much weight on Weberian modern rationality as it does on imagination, and critically functions as a means to recuperate cultural boundary cross ing in female gender performance and construction.
Routledge eBooks, Sep 5, 2022
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, Mar 1, 2015
Oxford Art Journal, 2022
This article explores a painting of a mountain-like coal mine dissected into terraces by rails, w... more This article explores a painting of a mountain-like coal mine dissected into terraces by rails, wires, and excavators by the ink artist Fu Baoshi (1904–1965). It considers the question: how to paint a landscape as it was being exposed to and was disappearing from view? Are there ecocritical lessons we can learn from the artist’s reconciliation of what he calls geomorphological ‘visual excavation’ of landscapes with equally deep and blindly felt emotions of being present at the mines? The article asks us to look for the ghosts haunting Fu’s experience of the surfaces and depths of the landscape to which his painting can only gesture.
Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia, 2022
How do we see the places we know best? What does it mean when knowledge of a place does not shape... more How do we see the places we know best? What does it mean when knowledge of a place does not shape the way we see it but instead bends under the weight of emotions and memories colouring our view? During the 1950s and 1960s, the ink painter Fu Baoshi (1904-65) quietly reflected on these questions in a group of paintings of famous places in his hometown of Nanjing. One of the words the artist used to describe the strange texture and dynamic to his visual encounters with his painting subjects––the “glance” (yipie 一瞥)––is the focus of this short curatorial essay. Fu Baoshi’s “glance” as it is embodied in his landscape paintings challenges academic understanding of the term by revealing its emotional intensity, quality of directness, and, in spite of its heart-beat duration, the way it generates long-lasting impressions. Yet in some respects, the nature of the glance also makes these landscapes hard to see.
This article maps the ways that the arts of the brush are being conscripted at the 2010 Shanghai ... more This article maps the ways that the arts of the brush are being conscripted at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo to define the Chinese state's vision of an ideal city. Calling them "boundary forms" that support the logic and rationality of the state-promoted urban grid map, it asks how calligraphy and ink painting might also slip through those grid map boundaries toward something invisible and unmappable. The article draws upon Jean-François Lyotard's conception of ideological practices in the supermodern age of technological reproducibility and takes Cai Guo-Qiang's concurrent exhibition at the Shanghai Rockbund Museum as an immediate and relevant means of questioning the brush line's status at the Expo. Rather than demanding a politics of deconstruction or a radical response which would only replicate, or mirror obliquely, the state's ideological and economic agendas for urban construction and development, the paper considers the fugitive morphologies of ink that prevent it from being reduced to formulaic propaganda and instead open up new ways-inarticulate and idiosyncratically felt-of thinking about and seeing the city. Keywords Mediasphere. Calligraphy. Propaganda. Urban development. Exhibition culture The 2010 Shanghai World Expo in the southeastern precincts of the city is a distinctive space that possesses walls, gates, entrance tickets, and its own internal design logic that draws it away from its immediate surroundings and towards the national cultures on display from around the globe. Yet the obvious physical boundaries of the Expo don't begin to explain the way it is circumscribed differently from the city by history, by video and electronic technology, and by its rhetorical ambition to tackle what cities might become. Still, these are a complicated set of boundaries: If world expositions have historically limned a line between the local and the rest of the world, so, too, has Shanghai: once the "Paris of the East" and a treaty port, today it is home to roughly 19 million residents and 4.5 million sojourners (from migrant workers to foreign expatriates). 1 Then, too, the Expo exists not only in metric but in virtual forms; its boundaries extended by our capacity to see three dimensions in two, both on video displayed at
A s cities in China expand at a rate and to a size practically beyond belief, the language that w... more A s cities in China expand at a rate and to a size practically beyond belief, the language that we use to describe and define them is shifting. Words such as "metropolis," "cosmopolis," and even "urban" seem inadequate, not grand enough or encompassing enough to represent the enormity of this new intersection of rice fields and skyscrapers. They are being supplanted by the new language of polylocality, the "glocal," and terms such as "translocalmotion," the theme of the 2008 Shanghai Biennial, a word that evokes the powerful machinery of train locomotion, movement across space, and locality. It is rendered kuaicheng kuaike in Chinese, literally, "speedy city, speedy guest." In some cases, words that seem new in fact are being resuscitated from long disuse. They draw us back into the nineteenth century, another era of vast construction, migrations of people, and rapid circulation of commodities and capital. The nineteenth century gave birth to the megalopolis, a city without a centre, a space of endless urban sprawl, an inchoate architectural form. If London was the embodiment of the nineteenth-century megalopolis, the Pearl River Delta is its new embodiment in the twenty-first century. The city in China, in short, is so big and is moving so fast that it seems almost able to escape language. And so we find ourselves grasping for words to speak of it. Visual art begins to fill the gap. As an artist whose visual work limns the line between architectural and pictorial space and whose process as a painter and photographer is heavily informed by training in architecture and craft design, Xie Xiaoze is especially well situated to address the problem of the Chinese city. Photographs of his recent installation, Last Days, composed with collaborator
I n the process of painting Stained No. 2 (2009), more literally "ink traces" in Chinese (moji), ... more I n the process of painting Stained No. 2 (2009), more literally "ink traces" in Chinese (moji), Zheng Chongbin writhes across a muralsized eighteen foot length of mulberry paper, in which the shallowness of ink is built up through layers of brushwork, opaque whites, and the imprint of the bricks in the paper upon which it had lain while the artist painted. Slashing brush and pooling ink "vibrates, clenches, or cracks open because it is the bearer of glimpsed forces," to borrow the words of Gilles Deleuze. 1 Water, tissue wrinkles, the deep colouristic black of the ink, the heaviness of a thick acrylic, and a wet smear of brown stain, create organic shapes as well as an architectonic space for contemplation and introspection; they compellingly draw the viewer in. The picture is something so fluid-not framed but "deframed"-that it poses a conundrum: how to locate its space? And what are the stakes of entering into the space of an ink painting? A ready answer is provided, somewhat surprisingly, by the Chinese government. Ink painting had a peculiar presence, for instance, at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. The slogan of the Expo was, "Better City, Better Life," in English, or, in Chinese, "The City makes your life even more perfect!" (chengshi rang shenghuo geng meihao). At the Expo grounds ink painting in state propaganda was most typically presented in video, where montage transformed ink paintings into film sequences. A typical sequence: first mountains and streams appear on the video screen, black ink against white ground. As the brush starts to paint structures not from natural life but from the city-skyscrapers, telephone wires, and smoke stacks-one might be reminded of Socialist-era woodcuts that expressed the energy and might of the city. Unlike those idealized static views of the city, however, in these paintings there is a visual progression as the ground becomes darker with pooled water and ink, and the images start to look like a polluted environment. Out of the blackness a dim photograph of the city-often night scenes in colour, brightened with sparks of neon light-begins to Zheng Chongbin, Stained No. 2 (Moji), 2009, ink and acrylic on xuan paper, 144 x 560 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
How do we see the places we know best? What does it mean when knowledge of a place does not shape... more How do we see the places we know best? What does it mean when knowledge of a place does not shape the way we see it but instead bends under the weight of emotions and memories colouring our view? During the 1950s and 1960s, the ink painter Fu Baoshi (1904-65) quietly reflected on these questions in a group of paintings of famous places in his hometown of Nanjing. One of the words the artist used to describe the strange texture and dynamic to his visual encounters with his painting subjects-the "glance" (yipie 一瞥)-is the focus of this short curatorial essay. Fu Baoshi's "glance" as it is embodied in his landscape paintings challenges academic understanding of the term by revealing its emotional intensity, quality of directness, and, in spite of its heartbeat duration, the way it generates long-lasting impressions. Yet in some respects, the nature of the glance also makes these landscapes hard to see.
The ideological suppositions, images, and fantasy associated with orientalism has given rise to t... more 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 modem 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 "modem enchantment" as a heuristic device to interpret gender. Drawing from Wolfgang Iser's notions of the "Active," "mod em enchantment" lays as much weight on Weberian modern rationality as it does on imagination, and critically functions as a means to recuperate cultural boundary cross ing in female gender performance and construction.
Routledge eBooks, Sep 5, 2022
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, Mar 1, 2015
Oxford Art Journal, 2022
This article explores a painting of a mountain-like coal mine dissected into terraces by rails, w... more This article explores a painting of a mountain-like coal mine dissected into terraces by rails, wires, and excavators by the ink artist Fu Baoshi (1904–1965). It considers the question: how to paint a landscape as it was being exposed to and was disappearing from view? Are there ecocritical lessons we can learn from the artist’s reconciliation of what he calls geomorphological ‘visual excavation’ of landscapes with equally deep and blindly felt emotions of being present at the mines? The article asks us to look for the ghosts haunting Fu’s experience of the surfaces and depths of the landscape to which his painting can only gesture.
Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia, 2022
How do we see the places we know best? What does it mean when knowledge of a place does not shape... more How do we see the places we know best? What does it mean when knowledge of a place does not shape the way we see it but instead bends under the weight of emotions and memories colouring our view? During the 1950s and 1960s, the ink painter Fu Baoshi (1904-65) quietly reflected on these questions in a group of paintings of famous places in his hometown of Nanjing. One of the words the artist used to describe the strange texture and dynamic to his visual encounters with his painting subjects––the “glance” (yipie 一瞥)––is the focus of this short curatorial essay. Fu Baoshi’s “glance” as it is embodied in his landscape paintings challenges academic understanding of the term by revealing its emotional intensity, quality of directness, and, in spite of its heart-beat duration, the way it generates long-lasting impressions. Yet in some respects, the nature of the glance also makes these landscapes hard to see.
ecoArt China exhibition catalogue, https://www.ecoartchina.ca, 2021
OW DOES ART MAKE THE WORLD? Ancient Chinese correlative cosmology teaches that the movement of t... more OW DOES ART MAKE THE WORLD?
Ancient Chinese correlative cosmology teaches that the movement of the universe follows the ceaseless rhythm and transformation of the five elemental phases and yin and yang energies. Water, wood, fire, metal, and earth merge and meld into each other through fluid patters that are both generative and damaging.
Art has a place within this ecology. It is inside it, rather than out. Not merely a reflection, art is part of the cycle of transformation. But how does art make the world? It is our hope that the works of art in this exhibition—each connected with a particular elemental phase—will move you, make you think, touch your memory and imagination, and, in doing so, encourage you to gain fresh perspectives on ecological crises across the planet and possibilities for environmental justice.