Visual Culture Seminar 2024-2025

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Murder in the Maloo: A Tale of Old Shanghai

Dr Paul Bevan

Tuesday 12 November 2024, 17:00

front cover of Paul Bevan's book 'murder in the maloo: a tale of old shanghai'

Synopsis

Sensational adventure stories were all the rage in Shanghai in the early 20th century and Murder in the Maloo:
A Tale of Old Shanghai represents an excellent example of this most popular of popular fiction categories. The
book was written in the early 1920s by two authors, Qi Fanniu and Zhu Dagong and is set in the years 1878
and 1879. Translated into English and published here for the first time, this historical novel tells of the exploits
of Ma Yongzhen, a martial artist and gangster who was ruthlessly murdered by rival gangs. The story takes the
reader into the world of the Shanghai gangster and the opium dens, courtesan houses and teashops they
frequented. It is very loosely based on a true story, as Ma Yongzhen was in fact an historical figure, who rode
the horses of his native Shandong province and walked the streets of Shanghai in late Qing dyansty China. The
book follows Ma’s rivalry with local gangland bosses, the unscrupulous Scrofulous Bai and the ruthless opium
fiend and murderous mastermind, Cheng Zimin. For much of the story, Ma Yongzhen appears to be
unstoppable in his quest to dominate the Shanghai underworld, until a dastardly plan is laid to attack him
unawares. In addition to translating the novel, Paul Bevan has written an illuminating introduction and an
essay that vividly describes the city of Shanghai as Ma Yongzhen would have known it.

 

Speaker Bio

Dr Paul Bevan is a Sinologist, historian, researcher and literary translator. From 2020 to 2023 he worked as
Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Before that, from
2018 to 2020, he was Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. His research
focuses equally on the visual arts and literature, and concerns the impact of Western art and literature on
China during the Republican Era and the late Qing dynasty, particularly with regard to periodicals and
magazines. Paul’s first book, A Modern Miscellany – Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the
Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938, Leiden: Brill, 2015, was hailed as 'a major contribution to modern Chinese
studies’; his second, ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’: Modern Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during
Shanghai’s Jazz Age was published by Brill in 2020. John A. Crespi’s review calls attention to the translations
imbedded in the book: ‘Featured within the book’s densely informative analyses are translations of four
modernist short stories. [These] in themselves contribute significantly to modern Chinese literary studies…’.

Audio(visual) Sources for Chinese Socialist Soundscapes: A Methodological Exploration

Professor Jie Li (Harvard University)

Wednesday 27 November 2024, 17:00

Abstract

Sound and radio have become a flourishing new frontier in modern China studies. However, most recent books, dissertations and articles on audio broadcasting rely on written and printed sources such as state archives and memoirs. Lamenting the absence and inaccessibility of sound archives, historians have focused on media infrastructures and technopolitics, showing that sound studies is indeed possible without audio sources. Nevertheless, what are we missing by not listening to actual sounds? If audio recordings become available, what should we listen for?

This presentation will explore two types of audio(visual) sources for studying Chinese Socialist soundscapes. First, Prof. Li will analyse retrospective representations of radios and loudspeakers during the Mao era in films made between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s: China Behind (1974), Maple (1980), Blue Kite (1992), Farewell My Concubine (1993), To Live (1994), In the Heat of the Sun (1995), Xiu Xiu, The Sent-Down Girl (1998), Platform (2000), Electric Shadows (2005), and Shanghai Dreams (2005). Prof. Li proposes to treat such fictional films as media history, as they thematize the impact of mass media on ordinary people's historical experiences. Prof. Li will then introduce a serendipitous collection of audio recordings of PRC radio between 1966 and 1971 ‒ received and tape-recorded in Hong Kong by the American journalist Robert Elegant. After listening to short clips of central, local and ‘enemy’ radio, including readings of newspaper editorials, live broadcasting of mass rallies and parades, as well as contrarian voices and noises, there will be a discussion about what we hear and any unique insights that a sonic archive can give us beyond textual sources.

 

Speaker Bio

Jie Li is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is the author of Shanghai
Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era and Cinematic
Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China, which won the Kraszna-Krausz Moving
Image Award and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship. She co-edited the volume Red Legacies in China:
Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution and has published various articles on film, media, museum
and sound studies. She was recently named a Harvard College Professor for her contributions to
undergraduate teaching.

Transforming the Way of Water: Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea and Zao Wou-Ki’s Paintings

Dr Shuangyi Li

4 February 2025, 17:00

Abstract

The Kenyan writer Yvonne Owuor’s novel The Dragonfly Sea (2019) revolves around the female protagonist Ayaana, a supposedly Chinese descendant, growing up on the Kenyan island of Pate and travelling to China to study on a state-sponsored scholarship and back. The protagonist’s cross-cultural journey is deeply entangled with both historical past and contemporary global political and economic affairs. The Indian Ocean is portrayed as a space of ceaseless human and animal migrations, a network of historical, political, and economic relations, connectivities, and interchanges, which (in)form and (re)shape the basis and framework of what may be described as transcultural memories between and beyond Africa and China.

This talk proposes to approach this novel from an intermedial perspective. The Franco-Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki’s (1920‒2013) abstract paintings, drawing inspiration from Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Chinese calligraphic lines, and Daoist thought, are frequently cited in the novel, which points to a visually and artistically mediated encounter, understanding, and cultural memory beyond verbally constructed narratives. Zao shares Ayaana’s journey crossing the Indian Ocean by boat. Zao’s paintings, embodying cross-cultural aesthetics, resonate with Ayaana’s transformative perceptions, experiences, and reimaginings of the sea and cultural relations. They translate and transform each other in the autobiographical, fictional, and aesthetic making of Sino-African transcultural memories.

Speaker Bio

Shuangyi Li is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol. He is the author of two monographs: Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement: Translation and Transcultural Dialogue (2017, International Comparative Literature Association Anna Balakian Prize 2019) and Travel, Translation and Transmedia Aesthetics: Franco-Chinese Literature in a Global Age (shortlisted for R. Gapper Book Prize 2022). Shuangyi received his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Lund University in Sweden funded by the Swedish Research Council between 2017 and
2021. Together with Dr Fabien Arribert-Narce at Edinburgh, he has recently launched a new book series with Edinburgh University Press, titled ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in World Literature and Intermediality’.

Botanical Remediations: Farming, Plants and Contemporary Arts in Hong Kong

Dr Minna Valjakka, University of Helsinki

Tuesday 11 February 2025, 17:00

Monti Lai Wai Yi, Into the field 落田 (installation in Lai Chi Wo), 2019

Abstract

The interrelationship between people and plants is an inherent yet understudied aspect of arts in Asia. Since the 2010s,
the material, historical, symbolic and socio-political values of various plants and botanical materials have received more
attention in the contemporary arts across the region. In the book project from which this talk emerges, Dr Valjakka
explores how East and Southeast Asian artists are exploring new (im)material plant-based practices at the nexus of
changing perceptions and politics of vegetation. In this talk, Dr Valjakka focuses on these artistic practices that directly
engage with plants and their agency in Hong Kong. Inspired by recent studies in eco-critical art history and critical plant
studies, and through selected case studies that intertwine art, agriculture and gardening, she explores how artists draw
on explicit and implicit knowledge of the role of vegetation in more than human ecosystems. In doing so, artists such as
Monti Lai Wai Yi and Natalie Lai Lai Lo are redefining, repurposing and restoring the role of plants within and beyond art.
As a result, these botanical remediations not only address issues caused by cultural and socio-political transformations
but also offer ways to reconcile the relationships between different communities and ecosystems.

Speaker Bio

Minna Valjakka is a Senior Researcher and Associate Professor of Art History and Asian Studies at the
University of Helsinki, Finland. Through locally embedded research inspired by eco-critical art studies,
urban studies and environmental humanities, Dr Minna Valjakka investigates artistic and creative
practices in East and Southeast Asia. Her main interest is in exploring how diverse practices created in
public spaces intersect with environmental issues and the formation of civil society formation. Her multi-
sited approach is reflected in her publications in a range of journals, books and exhibition catalogues. As well as working
on a monograph on contemporary botanical arts and their (im)material remediations, Dr Valjakka is leading a new
interdisciplinary project, Ecological Conjunctions: Contemporary Arts and Natural Science Collaborations for Civil Society
Formation (EcoConjunctions), funded by the Research Council of Finland (2024‒2028).

Anthropocene Urbanity and Surreal Imagery: Hong Kong in Contemporary Sinophone Fiction

Dr Xiaofan Amy Li, University College London

4 March 2025, 17:00

 

Abstract

While much attention is paid to anglophone literature about ecological crises, discussions of how East Asian writings of the city articulate and contest the Anthropocene in local contexts remain inadequate. In this talk, Dr Li will examine recent Sinophone fiction (post-2000) by contemporary Hong Kongese writers, in particular Hon Lai-chu and Dorothy Tse. Dr Li focuses on the imagery of Hong Kong and its various fictional avatars, relating them to questions about urbanity in the Anthropocene and surreal motifs that recur in much Hong Kong literature. She will discuss how urban space, social relations, and affect are visualised in specific ways by the relevant literature, arguing that Hong Kongese Sinophone fiction offers surreal cityscapes that speak to particular dimensions of urban life in Hong Kong and weird nature-cultural entanglements symptomatic of the Anthropocene. Simultaneously, Hong Kong literature also helps us rethink certain assumptions about the critical uses and frameworks of ecocritical literature. Via this ecocritical reading, Dr Li will also trace crucial connections between environmental aesthetics and Surrealism, understood not as a Paris-centric movement of the European interwar era but a multidirectional, inter-East Asian, and global artistic field.

Speaker Bio

Xiaofan Amy Li is Associate Professor in Comparative Cultural Studies at University College London. She
completed her PhD at Queens' College, Cambridge. Amy was Junior Research Fellow in Comparative Literature
& Translation at St Anne's College, Oxford, and taught at SOAS and the University of Kent before joining UCL.
Her research focuses on French/Francophone and Chinese/Sinophone literatures and cultures. She is the
author of Comparative Encounters between Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi (Legenda, 2015) and the co-
author of Translation and Literature in East Asia: Between Visibility and Invisibility (Routledge, 2019). Her next
monograph on The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures is forthcoming with Cambridge
University Press.

A Touch of Noir: The Rise of Parasitic Media in Contemporary China

Dr Shiqi Lin, Cornell University

Wednesday 7 May 2025, 17:00

image for shiqi lin's talk a touch of noir

Abstract

This talk proposes a reading of noir as a symptomatic genre that has linked together the post-2010 Chinese media ecology to capture a dystopian societal mood of seeing no way out. Drawing theoretical insights from film noir, Dr Lin discusses how expressions of noir have grown prominent across cinema, science fiction, hip hop music, web series and social media in PR China. This collective turn towards noir, she argues, enabled Chinese media cultures to carry forward social criticism in a time of growing state control, but this was made possible only because this genre is morally and politically ambiguous enough to side with the shifting social climates. The talk examines a few paradigmatic shifts within this wave of Chinese noir through cultural products such as the crime film A Touch of Sin (2013), the hip hop song ‘Kill the Ninja’ (2016) and COVID-era social media livestreaming. The intertwinement of criticality and complicity inhabited by these media cultures gives rise to what Dr Lin terms as ‘parasitic media’ ‒ a form of media that strategically changes shape and generates ambiguous meanings, just like parasites within a host, in order to survive and subvert from within a hegemonic system. As such, she considers noir as a genre that marks structural conditions of impasse in our global time of crisis.

Speaker Bio

Shiqi Lin is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Cornell University. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include Chinese and global film and media studies, media theory, political theory and critical theory. Her current book project examines the rise and shift of documentary media in Chinese digital media landscapes since 2008. With anthropologist Xiaobo Yuan, she is the co-editor of a special issue, ‘Interrogating Futurity in Contemporary China’, for China Perspectives (2023). Her other works have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as Chinese Literature and Thought Today, positions politics, Foundry and Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media.