Daiwa Foundation Japan House – 13/14 Cornwall Terrace (Outer Circle) – London NW1 4QP
Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Zoe Dusanne, John Matsudaira, and Kenjiro Nomura at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery, Seattle, 1952. Photo: Elmer Ogawa
In this talk, David F. Martin will discuss the art of Japanese-American painters active in Seattle, Washington in the early to mid- 20th century. Beginning with the first generation Issei to the next generation of Nisei, several of these artists achieved national and international reputations during their lives. However, their careers and personal lives suffered from being interned in incarceration camps on the American west coast during WWII. Martin will feature a wide range of styles practised by these artists from impressionism to modernism and abstraction. He will present rare images of paintings completed by some of the artists during their incarceration.
David F. Martin is American curator and writer specializing in the art history of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest associated with Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, Washington, USA. For over thirty years, his career has focused on women, Japanese and Chinese Americans, gay & lesbian and other American minorities who had established national and international reputations during the period 1890-1960.
Patuá is a Portuguese-Asian Creole language once quite widely spoken in Macao. It has largely fallen out of use and fluent speakers now number perhaps only dozens in Macao and possibly a hundred in Hong Kong. So any attempt to revive Patuá is welcome and Elisabela Larrea’s book “Unchinho di Língu Maquista: Patuá Bit by Bit: Flashcard Book” looks like a good way to start. I think I might give it a go…
An interview with Elisabela and more on “Unchinho di Língu Maquista: Patuá Bit by Bit: Flashcard Book” in the Macao Daily Posthere.
Book #49 in the Sinica Ultimate China Bookshelf is now up on the Sinica Substack… Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (1991).
A massive international best-seller detailing three generations of Chinese women in twentieth-century China — Chang’s grandmother, mother, and finally herself. Chang paints a portrait of the political and military turmoil of China in this period, from the marriage of her grandmother to a warlord (薛之珩 Xuē Zhīhéng), then her own mother’s experience of Japanese-occupied Jinzhou, and finally her own experiences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Wild Swans has been translated into 38 languages and sold well over 20 million copies. It is reportedly banned in mainland China.
Bravo Elisabela Larrea & her new flashcards! Anything that helps the resugence & survival of patuá, traditional Macanese creole, is seriously welcome to save this heritage. UNESCO classifies patuá as “critically endangered”….
In Developing Mission (Cornell University Press), Joseph W. Ho offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space—tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People’s Republic of China.
When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war.
Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the United States.
Hey Barnes & Noble members – Preorder my new book HER LOTUS YEAR (out 11/24 from St MartinsPress) before 4/19 & get 25% off with code PREORDER25. NB: discount only available to B&N members (sign up here: barnesandnoble.com/membership/). Already a member? Preorder at: https://bit.ly/HerLotusYearBN
These images (below) are all interesting, not just for their intrinsic beauty as watercolurs, but their ownership. The paintings were all purchased, probably in Shanghai, around the late 1890s by Captain John Dewar (1866-1950), a ship master, born in Shanghai though probably of Scottish origins. In 1896 Dewar married Susan Smith Oudney (1875-1967) in Shanghai. Susan’s father was William Oudney (DOB: 1846), originally from Dundee (Susan too was born in Dundee), who became a sailor and eventually a master mariner owned two clipper ships involved in the China Trade. Her mother was Isabella Mawer.
John and Susan were prolific collectors (much of which was passed down through the famioly andhas recently been coming up for auction) and seem to have bought mostly Chinese paintings and objets d’art, including the items below…
Hsiao Chen. Hua (Fa) Mulan on Horseback, 19th century Watercolour
A large pair of Chinese ancestor portrait scroll paintings, c.late 19th century
A Chinese double ancestor portrait scroll painting, c.late 19th/early 20th century
A Chinese famille rose porcelain hexagonal brush pot, c.late 19th century.
