Book Talk with Winnie Wong—VMCC Series
In this public talk, Winnie Wong presents and discusses her most recent book, The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade. She explores two countervailing urgencies in contemporary cultural politics: the drive to recognize all individuals as artists so that they may be granted the rights and privileges of authorship; and, at the same time, the inadequacy of the modern figure of “the artist” to contain the ingenuity, imagination, and originality of anonymous workers. It does so by focusing on a long marginalized but ubiquitous genre of painting: portraits produced by Chinese artisans in the port of Guangzhou for European merchants at the height of the Qing dynasty. In this relationship, makers are anonymized, while merchants’ lives are preserved in vivid detail, but portraiture occasions the empirical scene of their encounter. This book charts a framework for understanding visual production and trade across overlapping imperial spaces, and demonstrates how contemporary art historical inquiry can yet decouple authorial names from authorial works, a step necessary to looking anew at anonymity, multiplicity, and the ingenuity of nameless artisans.
Winnie Wong is a professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an art historian with a special interest in fakes, forgeries and counterfeits.
This event is presented as part of the Visual & Media Cultures Colloquium (VMCC) series.
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ADMISSION
– Open seating/admission (no ticket or registration required)
– FREE and open to the public.
– Located at Porter College D245
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FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
– Wed., Nov 12: Book Talk with Winnie Wong
– Additional dates to be announced
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PARKING
– Lot 124 & 125 are the closest parking lots to the event
– Parking by permit or ParkMobile
– TAPS provides additional parking information
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ABOUT THE SERIES
This event is presented as part of the Visual & Media Cultures Colloquium (VMCC), an annual lecture series that brings cutting-edge scholars to speak on a broad range of subjects related to visual and media culture. The series is co-sponsored with the graduate programs in the History of Art & Visual Culture (HAVC) and the Film & Digital Media departments. Each year, the students and a faculty coordinator are responsible for selecting, inviting and hosting speakers from a list of suggested names submitted by their peers and HAVC faculty. Together they share the unique challenge and opportunity of creating a program that brings to campus an array of cutting-edge scholars to speak on a broad spectrum of subjects.
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Image Credit: Peabody Essex Museum
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This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.
