Watch, Read, Listen

Olga Tsapina, curator of American historical manuscripts at The Huntington, discusses the importance of a little-known photograph from renowned Civil War photographer Mathew Brady’s studio that reveals the forgotten pallbearers of Abraham Lincoln, now on display in the exhibition “What Now, Part 2.”

This symposium interrogates the issues raised by contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley’s new painting Portrait of a Young Gentleman, which responds to Thomas Gainsborough’s grand manner masterpiece The Blue Boy. Between these two paintings, separated by 250 years, lies a colonial history that has managed representation across a field of visuality, nominating certain figures for human status and others for something less or more. What does it take, in a Euro-American art tradition, to look like a person? And what might come after coloniality in art?

Huiwen Lu, professor of art history at National Taiwan University, takes the audience into the strange and enchanting world of wild cursive calligraphy when it first appeared in China in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. Lu looks at the development of this script in history as it went from being perceived as a magical act unattainable by human power to a specialized skill manageable by learning. Retaining a great capacity for artistic expression, wild cursive calligraphy transformed over time as personal identity, intention, and choice of historical models varied in the hands of individual calligraphers.

In this talk, Qianshen Bai, professor and Dean of the School of Art and Archaeology, Zhejiang University, explores some foundational questions concerning Chinese calligraphy: How did writing become a fine art in China? Where is the boundary between functional writing and visual art? And what are the social functions of Chinese calligraphy?