Open AccessMaking the World: Pictures and Science in Modern China
Author(s) -
Lisa Claypool,
Banafsheh Mohammadi,
Anran Tu,
Daniel S. Walker,
Yue Wang,
Akosua Adasi,
Liuba Gonzalez De Armas,
Julie Dranitsaris,
Christina Kim,
Chelsea Jungeun Koo,
Connor MacDonald,
Justine Pelletier,
Shirly Zhang
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
spectrum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2561-7842
DOI - 10.29173/spectrum51
Subject(s) - attunement , exhibition , beauty , aesthetics , the arts , china , visual arts , perspective (graphical) , art , sociology , history , alternative medicine , archaeology , pathology , medicine
How do pictures make the world? In 1907 the Chinese fiction writer and social critic Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936) essayed the thought that making the world depended on attunement towards beauty’s emotional vibrancy and on an imaginative frequency to scientific thought, both. This curatorial project asks after pictures made mostly during Lu Xun’s lifetime, in turn-of-the-century China, mostly by brush-and-ink painters, but also by embroiderers, photographers, cartoonists, taxidermists, map-makers, and others who worked self-consciously within the arts and sciences, popular or academic. Their pictures carry within them their own struggles with the rationalities of science, as well as emotions and imagination, to make the world. Still, as curators of each of the six thematic sections of the exhibition observe, the pictures also escape the hands of their makers; they are thrown back into the flow of time through the questions they pose of us now, questions that we hope will prompt us to see and sense nature and each other differently, and in doing so, to make our own world from a newly aware and nuanced perspective.