"An Anachronistic Medium: Magic Lantern and the Art World in Mao's China (1949-1976)"
4:45 PM on Tuesday, October 24th, 2023
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Abstract:
What is the divide between creative labor and artistic work? How does the platformization of culture exploit the intrinsic human desire for creative expression? Can the promotion of mass art democratize artmaking? This presentation engages with these seemingly contemporary questions by examining the fervent embrace of magic lantern in Mao’s China, where this media, largely superseded by cinema globally, was celebrated as a superior medium precisely for its capacity for fostering creative participation. By rediscovering the long-forgotten slide artists, this talk sheds light on the artworkers and amateurs whose exclusion from both the art world and contemporary art history has been indispensable to the symbolic economy of socialist art.
Speaker Biography:
Yi GU is an associate professor of Chinese modern and contemporary art at University of Toronto. Her research interests include cold war visual culture, comparative media studies, Chinese photography history, mass art, and the politics of aesthetics. Her book, Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting (Harvard University Press Asia Center, 2020), examines the role epistemic shifts in perception played in nation-building. Her current research focuses on the agrarian imaginary and various extractive regimes including those of historical socialism.
She is the co-editor of Trans Asia Photography and the convener of a series of digital humanities projects on twentieth-century Chinese art.
