China Studies Centre, The University of Sydney
The CSC Bookworm Series
Date: Wednesday 10 November 2021
Time: 12:00PM – 1:00PM AEDT
Location: Online
This seminar is free and open to the public!
John Clark’s magisterial The Asian Modern reconstructs the notion of art and its historiography in Asia, including Australia. Writing the history of the Asian modern through the social life of artists, he generates a new paradigm for the narration of art. Both volumes meticulously chart his analysis of art in Asia from the 1850s to the present day, providing an invaluable resource for the scholar and layman alike.
Among major studies of around 25 major artists from all over Asia, including three from Australia, the book has sections devoted to Xu Beihong, Pan Yuliang, and Zhang Peili. This talk will focus on the work and biography of these artists as indexes for certain kinds of modernity in Chinese art.
About the speakers
Emeritus Professor John Clark
John Clarkis Emeritus Professor in Art History at the University of Sydney, the author of six books and editor or co-editor of another five. His Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art of the 1980s and 1990s (2010) won the Best Art Book Prize of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in 2011. He has also published two collections of earlier papers, Modernities of Chinese Art (2010), and Modernities of Japanese Art (2013).
Dr Yvonne Low (chair)
Yvonne Low specialises in the modern and contemporary arts of Singapore and Indonesia. Her research interests include colonial histories, cultural politics of art development, women artists and feminist art history, and digital art history. Yvonne has published over 40 books, peer-reviewed journals and exhibition catalogues, and is on the editorial committee of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. She holds degrees majoring in Art History from the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne. She has taught at Nanyang Technological University, School of Art Design and Media, the University of New South Wales, Faculty of the Built Environment and is currently a Lecturer in Asian Art at the University’s Power Institute where she co-convened the inaugural Gender in Southeast Asian art histories symposium in 2017.