Through a national lens : the art and politics of photography in Republican China
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines the ascent of photography to the status of fine art in a time of heightened national consciousness in Republican China (1912--1949). It focuses on the formative period of pictorial photography, from the first public photographic art exhibition in the late 1910s through 1937, when the outbreak of Sino-Japanese war brought art photography in China to a standstill. Through integrated analyses of photographs, artist writings, and period press accounts, this study argues that Chinese photographers developed an acute awareness of their dual positions behind the camera: as modern artists, and as members of a fledgling nation still forging an identity within a new global politics. When Chinese photographers began to participate in the international art movement of pictorialism, tension between these two roles peaked as these camera artists strove to create a distinctive photographic identity for China. Bringing together Chinese, Japanese, and English-language primary sources, I show how competing nationalist and internationalist impulses informed the discourse, practice, and aesthetic concerns of photographic art in China. In doing so, this study considers how photography formed concepts of national identity in an era of intense national rivalries. It emphasizes the heated politics behind softly-focused photographs of seemingly apolitical subjects, revealing how making an art of photography became essential to the profile of a modern China.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Lee, Hsinyi Tiffany |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Vinograd, Richard Ellis |
| Thesis advisor | Vinograd, Richard Ellis |
| Thesis advisor | Kwon, Marci |
| Thesis advisor | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Wang, Ban, 1957- |
| Degree committee member | Kwon, Marci |
| Degree committee member | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
| Degree committee member | Wang, Ban, 1957- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Hsinyi Tiffany Lee. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Hsinyi Tiffany Lee
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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