Photography’s development as a new form of art and technology coincided with profound changes in the way China engaged with the world in the nineteenth century. The medium evolved in response to war, trade, travel, and a desire for knowledge about an unfamiliar place. Power and Perspective provides a rich account of the exchanges among photographers, artists, patrons, and subjects in the treaty port cities that connected China and the West. Drawing primarily from the Peabody Essex Museum’s historic and largely unpublished collection of photographs, this generously illustrated volume examines the confrontations and collaborations that shaped the adoption and practice of photography in China. Offering an original reassessment of the colonial legacy of the medium, Power and Perspective addresses photography’s representations of racial hierarchy and its entanglement with histories of European imperialism in nineteenth-century China.
Power and Perspective: Early Photography in Chinaexplores how the camera transformed the way we imagine China. Photography’s development as a new form of art and technology in the 19th century coincided with profound changes in the way China engaged with the world. The medium evolved in response to war, trade, travel, and a desire for knowledge about an unfamiliar place.
The exhibition features 130 photographs in dialogue with paintings, decorative arts, and prints drawn largely from PEM’s outstanding collections with select loans from public and private collections. Power and Perspective provides a rich account of the exchanges between photographers, artists, patrons and subjects in treaty port China, offering a vital reassessment of the colonial legacy of the medium. By calling attention to the power dynamics at play, the exhibition sheds light on photography as an inherently social medium that continues to shape our perspectives today.
Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China is organized by the Peabody Essex Museum. The exhibition is made possible by the generosity of Dr. Edward G. Tiedemann Jr., the Richard C. von Hess Foundation, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. Additional generous support was provided by Stephan Loewentheil, Henry Birdseye Weil and Ann Uppington, Xiaohua Zhang and Quan Zhou, the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund, the Blakemore Foundation, Robert and Bobbie Falk and two anonymous donors. Thank you to PEM supporters Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation and the individuals who support the Exhibition Incubation Fund: Jennifer and Andrew Borggaard, James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes, Kate and Ford O’Neil, and Henry and Callie Brauer. We also recognize the generosity of the East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum.
Series 2 of the Western Edition podcast is a fascinating history of and discussion about LA’s Chinatown (the original one under Union Station, the new one and the short-lived China City project too). Well worth a listen, and Lisa See is featured too. Wherever you get your podcasts….or here
Fimmaker Robin Lung, who made the fantastic Finding Kukan documentary a few years ago, has a new project.
Robin has made a a short documentary I produced on photojournalist Nancy Bannick and her effort to preserve Honolulu’s Chinatown in the face of devastating urban renewal projects in the 1960s and 70s, will premiere at the Hawaiʻi International Film Festival on November 12 at 2pm at the Honolulu Museum of Art’s Doris Duke Theater. It will also be available to stream online November 14-27. NANCY BANNICK: SAVING HONOLULU’S CHINATOWN is part of a terrific slate of films in HIFF’s “Looking Back” series that features another Chinatown short by Kimberlee Bassford, a short on the history of Kapaʻa town on Kauaʻi, and a tribute to the late photographer Corky Lee. The four films should generate really great discussion afterwards, so I hope you can join me at the theater. If not you can access all of the films online with a virtual HIFF ticket or online pass. Be sure to check out the full program at HIFF because there are wonderful Hawai’i made films that are sure to interest many of you.
Chloe Gong’s Foul Lady Fortune is a rare beast – very readable Shanghai 1930s-set YA fiction.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights comes the first book in a captivating new duology following an ill-matched pair of spies posing as a married couple to investigate a series of brutal murders in 1930s Shanghai.
It’s 1931 in Shanghai, and the stage is set for a new decade of intrigue.
Four years ago, Rosalind Lang was brought back from the brink of death, but the strange experiment that saved her also stopped her from sleeping and aging – and allows her to heal from any wound. In short, Rosalind cannot die. Now, desperate for redemption for her traitorous past, she uses her abilities as an assassin for her country.
Code name: Fortune.
But when the Japanese Imperial Army begins its invasion march, Rosalind’s mission pivots. A series of murders is causing unrest in Shanghai, and the Japanese are under suspicion. Rosalind’s new orders are to infiltrate foreign society and identify the culprits behind the terror plot before more of her people are killed.
To reduce suspicion, she must pose as the wife of another Nationalist spy, Orion Hong. Although Rosalind finds Orion’s cavalier attitude and playboy demeanour infuriating, she is willing to work with him for the greater good. But Orion has an agenda of his own, and Rosalind has secrets that she wants to keep buried. As they both attempt to unravel the conspiracy, the two spies soon find that there are deeper and more horrifying layers to this mystery than they ever imagined.
