Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood , by Yiman Wang . Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013. xiv + 217 pp. HK$195.00/US$25.00 (paperback) (original) (raw)
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When Rubens painted his altarpiece The miracles of St. Francis Xavier, he included among the onlookers in the background a man in a yellow robe, turquoise trousers, and a curious conical hat (figs. 1, 2). The figure was probably based on an earlier drawing that is now known as Man in Korean costume (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) (fig. 3). The drawing has been related to Siamese ambassadors in London, pagan priests in Goa, and European missionaries in China, but the association with Korea has been most persistent since it was first put forward in 1934: the sitter may have been a freed Korean slave who traveled from Japan to Rome, where Rubens could have met and portrayed him. The drawing’s degree of detail suggests that at least the dress was done from observation. When the Getty Museum devoted an exhibition to the work in 2013, its experts concluded that the costume may have been authentically East Asian. They also called Rubens’s rendition an ‘imaginative’ interpretation that ‘defies categorization’: he did not face a Korean man. The following will put forward another view, namely that Rubens’s drawing was based on an earlier work by another artist. This was a portrait of an individual: a Chinese merchant who traveled on a ship of the Dutch East India Company – in fact the first Chinese to visit Europe whose identity is documented in such detail. The new conclusion is based on an entry in an album amicorum of the Dutchman Nicolaas de Vrise, dated 1595-1609 (fig. 4, 5). One of this album’s contributions, of 12 January 1601, is a colored drawing similar to Rubens’s. The image is furnished with an inscription in Chinese and an explanation in Latin on the reverse. These texts identify the sitter as the Chinese merchant Yppong who traveled, via Java, to Middelburg where he arrived on 31 May 1600. Additional Dutch and Chinese sources document Yppong’s successful career after his return to Southeast Asia, as a middleman for the Dutch East India Company.
REVISITED: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO A PORTRAIT ONCE ATTRIBUTED TO PETER PAUL RUBENS
Part of the collection of the Rubens House in Antwerp is a portrait of young Anthony van Dyck, alternatively attributed to Peter Paul Rubens and his pupil Anthony van Dyck. In order to reconstruct the genesis of the portrait in a manner that improves upon past investigations, a number of high-end technological methods, such as X-radiography, X-ray computer tomography, mammographic tomosynthesis and macroscopic X-ray fluorescence, have been employed to render the overpainted layers visible again. The results of the interdisciplinary examinations of the portrait of the youthful Van Dyck are impressive. The combined results allow the later additions to be peeled away until the original composition can be reached. Several pentimenti are easily discernible and refer to a rather immature hand that makes the authorship of Peter Paul Rubens very unlikely. What emerges is a portrait of an ambitious young man with a luxuriant head of hair and a slightly turned-up collar. The hat and cape were added later. The facial features are more recognisable and the execution of the bold curls points irrefutably in the direction of Anthony van Dyck as the author of his own portrait.
Re-reading the Exotic Other in Orientalist Paintings.
Abdelmalek Essaadi University, 2018
This paper aims at exploring the hegemonic colonial discourse Orientalist paintings bestow. It provides a re-reading of these western paintings employing a post-colonial approach, mainly they theory of Orientalism in which the Palestinian-American literary critic Edward W. Said has established. The project puts these paintings under harsh criticisms; subverting the colonial agendas they manifest and challenging accepted norms and aesthetic values in which they carry. Thus, based on counter-narratives that debunk the authenticity of orientalist artistry, this research paper calls for a re-evaluation of the representation of the exotic other in western paintings.
Studying the Studio: the Art Gallery of Rubens Depicted?
Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art, 2015
Paintings of art galleries do not only represent works of art, they also provide us with a visual understanding of the context in which they were once displayed. Of special interest is the art gallery of Rubens, an artist who himself owned a reputed collection of antique sculptures and paintings that is presumably depicted in the seventeenth-century painting The Studio of Rubens. Only, is it indeed Rubens' studio that is represented? In this paper, the diverse aspects of the painting, such as the represented works of art, the staffage, and the provenance, as well as the placement of The Studio of Rubens within the tradition of depicting art galleries in seventeenth-century Antwerp, will be examined. As a result, the study of The Studio of Rubens draws connections between creators, patrons, dealers, and connoisseurs – of art.
Aisthesis, 2019
Cultural factors are operating in the aesthetic experience of pictorial realism, occurring in a transcultural manner, and their effects are salient in beholder's affec-tive reaction correlated with perceptual-cognitive operation. This paper aims to demonstrate this hypothesis, by developing two analytical tools that might explain the anti-hedonic valence of Hong Taeyong, an eighteenth-century Korean literatus' aesthetic experience of a Western religious fresco depicting the Lamentation of Christ in a Jesuit Catholic church in Beijing. First, a complex multifold conflict between «actual affect» and culturally modeled «ideal affect», operating simultaneously in his visual experience , might be translated into a highly negative valence of his global affective state. Second, the variance of processing fluencies at different levels would have made his global processing operation less fluid, and it might play a role in his negative affective valence, since the affect is inherent in processing fluency signal. Keywords. Aesthetic experience of pictorial realism, «ideal affect» and «actual affect», «perceptual fluency» and «conceptual fluency», Hong Taeyong. Pictorial realism is usually understood in terms of picture's visual quality or subject matter, but it can also be conceived of as a per-ceiver's aesthetic experience of the feeling of seeing the real in the picture. Still life paintings by the famous seventeenth-century Dutch artist Cornelis de Heem, for instance, are «realistic» mainly by virtue of their detailed description and three-dimensional rendering of flowers, fruits, foods, etc., though the depicted objects might inadvertently suggest symbolic meanings or contents. Courbet's monumental painting A Burial at Ornans is «realistic», as it represents an ordinary, but actual scene, gathering together the clergy, a mayor, and people from all works of life, without any idealization or «evi-dent rhetoric of classical or romantic beauty» (Schapiro [1941-1942]: 1 I am very grateful for the comments by Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Bence Nanay, and Daeyeol Kim.