About this talk

Surfaces are major structural forces in society in the ways that they divide, depict, and contain people, places, and information. In contemporary and traditional Chinese culture, surfaces occupy an especially important position both as venues for aesthetic displays as well as sites of governance and control. Focusing in particular on three types of surface: walls, tactile surfaces, and skin, this workshop probes the changing roles and meanings of these surfaces across various periods of Chinese culture. From the iconic Great Wall to the demolition of walls carried out as part of the vast urban renewal projects in contemporary China to the practice of wall writing, walls make visible the changing values and rules of society. The skin is an ambiguous surface in Chinese culture; some cutaneous marks are highly stigmatized, as is the case with many forms of tattoo, whilst other kinds of inscriptions on the skin, such as skin whitening, have been prized. With the omnipresence of touchscreen media in contemporary China and the enduring significance of embroidery throughout its history, tactile surfaces have proven to be an enduring and important medium in Chinese culture albeit with highly divergent functions. The three panels of this workshop – on walls, skin, and tactile surfaces - think carefully about the sensory, social, historical, and aesthetic dimensions of these surfaces. Panel 1: Wall Li Jinying (Brown University): TBC Gerda Wielander (University of Westminster): Seeing, Feeling, Knowing: Reading China’s 'Open Air Galleries' Through Three Overlapping Frames Sun Han (University of Oxford): White Heiti Characters on Red Background: Residues of the Socialist Visual Experience Panel 2: Tactile Surfaces Chen Jianqing (Washington University): Four Dialectics of the Touchscreen from a Chinese Perspective Yuan Yan (Huazhong University of Science and Technology): Texture: Another Universe of Technical Image Panel 3: Skin Ming Tak Ted Hui (University of Oxford): Itching to Sensationalise: Semantic Shifts of yang 癢 in Premodern Chinese Literature Raffaela Rettinger (University of Wuerzburg): Writing on Skin with Needled Brushes: Decorative Tattooing Practices in Premodern China Julius Kochan (University of Oxford): ‘White Skin and Rosy Cheeks’ (白里透红): The Changing Language of Skin Whitening in Contemporary China

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