Description
RECOMMENDATION: Discretionary grant of $22,000 to the University of Maryland ( https://www.umd.edu/ ) for a project on Chinese calligraphy and painting studies in Postwar America
Over the past 20 years, the Asia Program has included Chinese art history among a set of fields deserving special attention. The focus has been predominantly on encouraging field building in China and scholarly exchange with Americans, but we have also devoted resources to research and training in the United States. Professor Jason Kuo, in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park, has had some connection with both prongs of this grantmaking. He served as an advisor in some years to our US-China Cooperative Research Program (1988-1998). Several grants made through that program informed our later decision to prioritize Chinese art history. Kuo’s involvement in two such collaborative projects (UC Berkeley in 1991 and University of Maryland in 1993) resulted in a volume he edited on Shanghai visual culture. In 2000, HLF made a grant to the University of Maryland for a multi-year summer institute on Chinese calligraphy and painting connoisseurship, a training program for American graduate students that Kuo led.
In the current proposal, Kuo again plans to bring graduate students together with senior academics, this time at a conference to examine Postwar American scholarship on Chinese art. The project has some resonance with China, Art, History: New Orientations , the conference in honor of Professor Wu Hung at the University of Chicago that we supported in 2016, but Kuo’s proposed effort will take a more conscious look back at historiographical, cultural and institutional influences on the shape of the field in the American academy today, with its blend of traditional Chinese approaches, emphasizing connoisseurship, and the theories and methods employed by Western art history. In this, it in some ways parallels a 2006 special grant we made to UC Berkeley for a conference on the history of East Asian library collections in North America.
Forty people are expected to attend the two-day conference. Our grant would cover honoraria for eight speakers and partial travel support for twelve advanced graduate students from outside Maryland, along with hospitality and miscellaneous conference costs. The university will contribute the conference space, AV and $3,000 toward the event, and has waived indirect costs. As a part of the proceedings, participants will spend time with the Chinese calligraphy and painting collections at the newly renovated Freer/Sackler Galleries in DC. An edited volume is anticipated as one outcome, to be funded separately. At a time both of generational change and new theoretical turns in the field, the event and the publication should reveal the outlines of a discipline in formation and knowledge about the early pioneers involved in this instance of Sino-Western cultural exchange.
