Dialectic Redemption: Lang Jingshan, Literati Landscape in Photomontage, 1920s-1940s
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Whereas most existing studies on Lang Jingshan’s landscape photomontage center around a nationalistic and pictorialist perspective, this article explores the political implications of Lang’s montage as a way to revisit the problematic relations of the past, identity, and political aspirations in the Republican Era. The first part of the article delineates the cultural landscape of the era within which the artist’s symbolic “return” to past imagery, aesthetics and sensibilities could be adequately understood. For those who were not yet convinced that the present course of events could not be resisted – whether the encroachment of urbanization and its unsettling fragmentary spectacles, a long-established Western Orientalist gaze, or modern technology’s suspension of genuine human expressions – the author argues, the decision to redeem the hopes of the past might well have seemed the antidote for the current pathosis. Furthermore, through situating Lang’s globally acclaimed landscape iconography in intercultural politics, I seek to portray a historical conjunction between Chinese neotraditionalism and anti-Enlightenment Western philosophy, with respect to their allegation of the tyrannical discourse of modernity. By using photography in bringing past landscapes and aesthetics to the unsettling present, the author argues, Lang resorted to a device of immanent critique, extended the scope of what was confined in the May-Fourth-mythicized modernity, and anticipated a dialectical image of the future, a reality that was yet to be.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 2020 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Tan, Yawen | |
|---|---|---|
| Advisor | Wang, Ban | |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Center for East Asian Studies |
Subjects
| Subject | Stanford Global Studies |
|---|---|
| Subject | East Asian Studies |
| Subject | Photomontage |
| Subject | the Aesthetic of Redemption |
| Subject | Allegorical Impulses |
| Subject | Intercultural Politics. |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Tan, Yawen. (2020). Dialectic Redemption: Lang Jingshan, Literati Landscape in Photomontage, 1920s-1940s. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/kh044dn6701
Collection
Stanford Center for East Asian Studies Thesis Collection
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- Contact
- yawentan7@gmail.com
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