Speaker:
Jennifer Dorothy Lee, Associate Professor of East Asian Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Respondent:
Angie C. Baecker, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese History and Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, September 23, 2024
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom
Excessive worry. Persistent unease. Disquiet. Torment. A brain disorder. Just another ordinary feeling. Based on Jennifer Dorothy Lee’s new book, this talk will address the competing connotations and nomenclatures of the anxiety in Anxiety Aesthetics in twentieth-century China. Arguing that anxiety offers a crucial frame for perceiving the specificities of both contemporaneity and creative practices in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Lee hones in on the late 1970s and early 1980s, in particular, the Beijing Spring, as both a springboard and specific site for post-revolutionary transformations. How does anxiety inscribe art forms generated by socialist histories? How does anxiety, in turn, socialize art?
Jennifer Dorothy Lee is Associate Professor of East Asian Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lee’s first book, Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985, was published in February 2024 by the University of California Press. Lee’s article on socialist abstraction and the painter Wu Guanzhong was also recently published in positions: asia critique. Lee’s next research project, tentatively titled Diasporic Longing, will take up a transnational cultural memoir of family, migrancy, and music across China, Taiwan, France, and the US from the 1940s-1970s.
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