PS34 Chinoiserie: Exoticism and the Imagining of the Self and the Other in Architectural Culture 3:00 - 5:10pm Friday, 16th April, 2021 Category Paper Session - Track 9 Session Chair(s) Jean-François Bédard, Lawrence Chua

3:05 - 3:25pm

Orientalism as A Hermeneutic Translation: A nascent European Landscape Theory in William Chambers’s Treatises on Chinese Gardens

Yuxin Qiu independent scholar, Canada

Abstract

William Chambers (1723-1796) was an eighteenth-century architect known for his promotion of Orientalism through his two treatises related to Chinese gardening. Previous studies remained as conflict interpretations that make divided judgments on the correctness of Chambers’s texts. It is the result of under-theorized associations between Chambers’s texts and other evidence from either Chinese or Western contexts. The present essay adopts a theoretic model of hermeneutic translation and posits that interpretations of alien cultures culminate in advancements of self-interpretation. Therefore, Chambers’s texts developed Western landscapes through his retelling of Chinese gardens. The essay excavates a nascent Western landscape theory by reading Chambers’s texts against the only comprehensive Chinese garden treatise, The Craft of Gardens (Yuan Ye ), which scholars deem as one of Chambers’s reference. The essay emphasizes Chambers’s new landscape theory's two motifs—painterly ideas in gardening and explorations of emotions. The motifs can be unpacked as the following: Firstly, Chambers’s interpretation of Chinese “painting sensibility” (huayi ), which was a technique to bring forth implied beauties in a garden scenery, led to the articulation of how Western painting compositions could apply as a garden design method. Secondly, the attention to the Chinese idea of “the integration of emotions and views” (qingjing jiaorong ) intensified the Western discussion to rationalize psychological responses to nature. The above two aspects converged as a new theorization of seeing and responding to landscapes. In sum, Chambers’s translation disclosed Chinese gardens in an alternative way that is pertinent to the West. Meanwhile, he pieced together available thoughts fragmented in Western cultural horizons for the emergence of European picturesque garden theory.

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Chinoiserie: Imagining Self and Other in Architectural Culture 3:25 - 3:45pm

The Far East of the second Fin-de-siècle

Aniel Guxholli McGill University, Canada

Abstract

The Chinese pagoda and the Orientalizing orangery of the royal domain of Laeken near Brussels, built in the 1780s for the Habsburg rulers, are typical of the late eighteenth-century vogue of Chinoiseries. A century later, a second vogue sweeps Brussels and the continent, but it is different in nature. Set against expanding commercial and colonial projects, the renewed interest in the Extrême Orient also reflects a genuine admiration for that part of the world, and is accompanied by a sustained study of the artistic techniques and the underlying philosophical thought. La Philosophie de la nature dans l'art d'Extrême-Orient (1910) and “Kiai- tseu-yuan houa tchouan”, Enseignements du jardin (1918), the well-known works by the orientaliste Raphael Petrucci are significant of this trend. Born in Napes and trained in Paris, Petrucci set in Brussels in the 1890s where he continued his studies on Chinese painting, held a chair of positive aesthetics and close relations with Émile Tassel and Victor Horta, both devoted amateurs of the Far East and agents in the renewal of architecture and applied arts. Petrucci’s private correspondence reveals his sympathies for Horta’s Art Nouveau. His studies analyzed the art and underlying philosophical and religious thought, and although he had never been to China or Japan, provided a vision of the Far East as a distinct geographical and cultural entity, built on key common attributes which, though never explicitly, seem to address Western concerns by virtue of their opposition. What authors such as Petrucci found worthy of mention and their interpretation is revealing of their own milieu, and raises the question of the extent to which the Extrême Orient of the second fin-de-siècle, like the Middle Ages of the revivalists, is an intellectual construct which reflects felt inadequacies in art, urban life and attitude to nature in late nineteenth-century Western Europe.

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Chinoiserie: Imagining Self and Other in Architectural Culture 3:45 - 4:05pm

From Occidenterie to Occidentalism: Staging the World at the 1929 National Art Exhibition

Tianyuan Deng New York University, USA

Abstract

The 1929 National Art Exhibition, the first state-sponsored exhibition organized by the Nationalist Government in Shanghai, amounts to the first official attempt at defining the “national art” under a newly unified China. This paper argues that, in defining what is “national” about national art, a strategy of Occidentalism—the appropriation of cultural capital via Euro-American visual elements in historian Shu-mei Shih’s parlance—that departs from the pre-Revolution Occidenterie has been implemented. Not only were the artworks presented as aligning with the Occident, but the exhibition was also, importantly, staged in a sumptuous Art Deco interior that formed both a foil to and an organic part of the regime’s self-initiation into the wold stage. Specifically, I demonstrate that the Occidentalist tendency in Republican China, while continuing the transnational urge of the late-dynastic culture, also presents several important inversions of Occidenterie.

Two inversions are highlighted in this paper. The first is the shift from the object to the built environment. The reverberations struck between the artworks, the exhibition interior, the architectural setting, and the semi- colonial urban backdrop, affirm what historian Alexander des Forges identifies as a “media-sphere” and constitutes something of a gesamtkunstwerke. Secondly, as Occidentalism seeks to embed China further in a global cultural network, it also presents new problems unknown to Occidenterie, such as its implication with fascist visual culture.

I hope to extend the scope of our discussion of Occidenterie by showing its lingering legacy after the fall of Qing. The worldly impulse inherent in Occidenterie is not only inherited after May Fourth democratization but also diffused—widened—in new internationalist momentum set forth by Marxist revolution. By tracing what has changed and what not, I attempt to modestly shed light on both.

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Chinoiserie: Imagining Self and Other in Architectural Culture 4:05 - 4:25pm

Poy Gum Lee and the Politics of Self-Orientalism in New York’s Chinatown, 1945- 60

Kerri Culhane The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, United Kingdom

Abstract

This paper analyzes the use of modern Chinese architecture, itself a transnational hybrid, as a symbolic anti- Communist political statement by the Nationalist-aligned leadership of New York's Chinatown in the early Cold War era.

Since the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), Chinatown’s architecture has responded directly and cannily to American immigration policy and the socio-political climate that informs it. The particular experience of Chinese American architect Poy Gum Lee (1900-68) as the principal agent of duplex exchange between Chinatown and China during the mid twentieth century further complicates common narratives of Chinatown architecture as a form of strategically "self-orientalized" commercialism.

Lee, born to immigrant parents in Chinatown and trained in architecture in New York, was part of a mass migration of young Chinese Americans to China during the 1920s and 30s, the height of China’s Republican period. A founding member of China’s first professional architectural society, Lee worked with western-trained Chinese architects to establish an official architecture of the Chinese Republic, melding western building materials and techniques with traditional Chinese forms, notably flying-eave roofs. In association with Lü Yanzhi, Lee was charged with completing the Sun Yat-Sen Mausoleum (Nanjing, 1926-29), the iconic monument of Chinese political and architectural modernism.

Repatriated to New York in 1945, Lee imported his experience of modern Chinese architecture to Chinatown at the very moment the Exclusion Act was lifted in response to US-China alliance in World War II. When Chinatown’s leadership and the Bank of China announced “The Chinatown Building Project” in 1946, Lee was tasked with bringing modern Chinese architecture from China to Chinatown, in a purposeful effort to architecturally distinguish the “American Chinese” from Communists and their Soviet-style modernism. Paradoxically, an architecture drawing upon traditional and modern Chinese precedent was deployed to facilitate the embrace of Chinese Americans by American society.

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Chinoiserie: Imagining Self and Other in Architectural Culture 4:25 - 4:45pm

Hans Scharoun and the Role of Chinese Architectural and Cosmological Cultures in his Practice

Liyang Ding University of Pennsylvania, USA

Abstract

Among the many documents in the Hugo Häring Archive at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin is a dark blue folder with a paper slip attached, on which Häring artistically wrote: “CHIWEB,” his abbreviation for “Chinesischer Werkbund” (Chinese Werkbund). The folder contains minutes of meetings about Chinese architecture and city planning held from November 1941 to May 1942. Major participants were, besides Häring, Hans Scharoun and Chen-kuan Lee (Scharoun’s assistant). Part of this history has been documented. Häring’s writing about the roof profile of Chinese traditional architecture, for instance, has been translated and published by Peter Blundell Jones. Wen-Chi Wang’s book, Chen-kuan Lee Und Der Chinesische Werkbund Mit Hugo Häring und Hans Scharoun (2010), provides the first scholarly attempt to discuss Häring and Scharoun’s encounters with East Asian architecture. The way in which Hans Scharoun interpreted Chinese architectural, urban, and cosmological tradition, however, remained understudied and poorly understood. In fact, Scharoun, who never visited East Asian countries, not only continued to study Chinese architecture and cities after the Chinese Werkbund meetings but also used the understanding obtained through his further research to advance his organicist architectural and urbanism ideas. This paper thus focuses on Scharoun’s practice and descriptive writings during the post-Chinese-Werkbund years, particularly examining his Darmstadt Volksschule project and his pertaining lecture at the Darmstadter Gespräch (both in 1951), with the aim to answer the following questions: (1) what intrigued Scharoun’s enduring interest in bridging the organicist principles and the Chinese architectural, urban and cosmological tradition; and (2) how did his immersive studies in Chinese culture affect his professional practice, both formally and conceptually?

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Chinoiserie: Imagining Self and Other in Architectural Culture