Saturday Onsite Presentation Session 3

Chinese Studies

Session Chair: Nim Yan Wong

14:05-14:30

67426 | Hanfu and the Reenactment of the Mid-autumn Festival: Becoming Han Through Affective Memory

Zheng Ying, Utrecht University, Netherlands

This study focuses on the embodiment of Han in historical reenactments. I will show my ethnography of an event I joined in China in 2021 that reenacted the traditional celebrations of the mid-autumn festival. The re-enactors were primarily women who like wearing hanfu (汉 服), allegedly the ethnic costume of Han Chinese. Poetically celebrating autumn, they reenacted the scenes of the elegant daily life of the scholar-gentries in the Ming dynasty, including kunqu (昆曲) performance and a crab feast. The feast was reenacted based on the records in classic literature, such as The Dream of the Red Chamber.Using the theories of assemblage and affect (Puar, 2005), I shift away from the state's top-down construction of Han identity. My analysis explores the mnemonic practice of modern Han women that, through bodily gestures, senses (sound/taste/tactility), and yijing (意境 poetic space), produces the memory/imagination of ancient Han women. I argue that the reenactors became the assemblage of Han in "the rhizomatic networks of temporality and cultural reference that exceed attempts at territorialization (whether at the local or national level) and identitarian reduction" (Rothberg, 2010). The affective memory was reproduced from diverse pasts that transcend regional borders, historical periods, and even realities. It disturbed the unified linear history that serves the nationalist construction of Han identity.

14:30-14:55

70756 | War and Peace: Guan Shanyue’s Art and Journey in the 1930s and 1940s

Bianca Yin-ki Cheung, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

Guan Shanyue 關山月, one of the leading figures in the Lingnan School of Painting, initiated his artistic journey during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945). The War not only devasted his life when Gaungzhou was occupied by Japanese troops in 1938, it also let him committed to modernise Chinese painting to reflect suffering in wartime. Guan experienced war firsthand, and the suffering of refugees touched him deeply. Guan finally reached Macau to join his teacher Gao Jianfu 高劍父. Besides learning painting from Gao, Guan spent most of his time sketching old fish boats, fishermen, children, labourers etc. He debuted his exhibition in Macau in 1938, with paintings exposing the brutality of Japanese troops and the grievances of the people. Dedicated to contribute to the War of Resistance by painting, Guan set off to Southwest and Northwest China, drawing many landscape sketches from scenic sites, held exhibitions, and funded his journey from income from selling his works. Other than learning from nature, Guan also absorbed a lot of traditional painting elements from his visit to Mogao caves in Dunhuang. His wartime artistic journey was concluded in his exhibition in August 1945 to showcase his paintings created in the Southwest, the Northwest, and Dunhuang. Guan’s wartime artistic adventures left a wonderful legacy for his lifetime artistic creation and effort to modernise Chinese painting with elements from nature and life.

14:55-15:20

70785 | Tales of a Pan-Asian Dandy: Chua Lam and the Making of Hong Kong Middlebrow Culture

Nim Yan Wong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Chua Lam (1941--), a prominent Hong Kong film producer and writer, has authored more than two hundred bestselling books in Chinese, and has recently ventured into the realm of English publication with his latest work, "Tales of a Hong Kong Dandy". In this book, Chua provides a compelling exploration of the life of a Hong Kong dandy, with a Pan-Asian vision that encompasses a broad spectrum of experiences, from a Japanese monk to a Korean Kisaeng, from a Taipei cabaret to the luxurious Aman hotel group in Bhutan, and from indulging in Wagyu beef to savoring single malt whiskey. The book's emphasis on materiality underscores the power of middlebrow culture, which the dandy embodies as an anarchist who flouts conventions with playfulness, stoicism, and a non-occupational status. The dandy's life-form and aesthetics transcend the confines of the traditional Bourdieuan literary field, thereby making the Hong Kong Dandy a captivating embodiment of an anarchist who does not claim anarchy.