january 2014 newsletter - royal asiatic society · 2016-01-05 · 2 royal asiatic society china –...

1

ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY CHINA – NEWSLETTER VOL 5 NO 1 – JANUARY 2014

The Society provides a forum for

the development and expression of

interests and expertise from within the local community, and from

around the globe, to inspire and to

enrich cultural life in Shanghai and

beyond.

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

JANUARY 2014

LECTURES & WEEKENDERS

21st January – Lecture

Photographer Liz Hingley will present her book ‘Shanghai’, published during Paris Photo 2013 by Be-Poles as part of the Portraits De Villes collection.

FOCUS GROUPS

Book Club: Mon 20th – James

McGregor ‘No Ancient Wisdom, No

Followers’

Film Club: Sun 19th – ‘Temptress

Moon’

Study Group: Mon 13th & 27th

Ad Hoc Study Group: Wed 15th

Art Group: Sun 12th – Insights into

Chinese Contemporary Art

Full updates and events at

www.royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

LETTER FROM OUR PRESIDENT

Dear members and friends,

First of all, let me wish you all a wonderful new year filled with abundance, joy, and treasured moments. May 2014 also be a splendid prosperous and interesting year to our Royal Asiatic Society.

December was an interesting month for the RAS. We had two lectures from Dr Sheena Burnell, the first of which took place on Tuesday 10th (foot binding) and the second Saturday 14th (Qing kingfisher accessories). Kate Baker realised her Jiading Walk, which had been rescheduled for several times due to unrecorded pollution in Shanghai’s history. Brian Davidson, HM Consul-General in Shanghai and our honorary vice-president hosted a lunch to Matt Parr, a British admiral, and RAS council members. The Art Group turned its attention to exploring Surrealism in art, while other focus groups also continued with their regular meetings and activities. The RAS is open to any suggestion for setting up musical or any other new theme groups and welcome competent members to take over the leadership.

As for our other plans, we are in the process of liaising with both the Shanghai and Beijing Literary Festivals to have Andrew Field speak about his Mu Shiying Monograph. Betty Barr has also approached us about holding an RAS-partnered event at SILF for the launch of her two new books. In January Liz Hingley

plans to lecture about her recently published photography book about Shanghai for the “Portrait de Villes” series. We are also working with Francesca Tarrocco to set up a panel discussion entitled “The Past, Present and Future of Photography in China”.

Looking further ahead, as 2014 marks the 70th Anniversary of Shanghai as a Port, this would be a good opportunity for us to invite journalists to some events for free, as that’s a good way to promote RAS. Regarding memberships, it’s been also suggested that we could have memberships per schools in which 6 members could attend.

I am personally grateful to each one of you for your efforts and wish you all the best. - Nenad Djordjevic

Happy New Year, and welcome to the January issue of the RAS newsletter!

A brand new year means a fresh set of resolutions, and here at RAS we plan to make 2014 as interesting and rewarding as possible for our members and friends. Read on to see what we have

planned for January!

Royal Asiatic Society China

January 2014 Newsletter

2


SHANGHAI:

DECEMBER HAPPENINGS & JANUARY NEWS

In December we were delighted to welcome Dr. Sheena Burnell to present a Lecture and a Weekender. On Tuesday 10th she

spoke at the Tavern @ Xingguo Radisson (pictured right) on the topic of foot-binding as a social and historic metaphor, displaying some pieces from her extensive collection of bound foot shoes and accessories. As well as discussing the methods of a practice that is now seen as brutal but which was customary in China for millennia, Sheena delved into the socio-historic implications of foot-binding and its origins and meaning.

The following Saturday, Sheena stoically presented a Weekender despite battling a bout of bronchitis! The Glamour Bar was the ideal location for her lecture about Qing Dynasty kingfisher hair accessories. These exquisite adornments

were all the rage in Old China; demand for them caused the extinction of a whole species of kingfisher. Despite many examples having survived, the methods of creating these intricate, iridescent items are still shrouded in mystery. Sheena presented an excellent overview of the artform, and showed several pieces from her own personal collection that she has maintained for many years (pictured here).

On a lovely winter day, Kate Baker led an RAS group (pictured right) to Jiading Old Town for a walk in a beautiful park, a tour of the Imperial Examination Museum at the Confucius Temple, and a stroll through the main square followed by lunch at the Jiading Hotel.

I am currently in the process of putting the Programme together for the rest of the year, and I can promise that there will be some great events. More information will be available

in future newsletters and on our website, but you can look forward to a special J.G. Ballard day in May, an Art Deco architecture walk, and lectures about contemporary Chinese sculpture and Jing’an Villas, to name but a few. Look out for us at the Shanghai

International Literary Festival, and further afield at the Beijing Literary Festival in March. Sign up for Lectures and Weekenders either at [email protected] or by replying to the mail-outs. I look forward to seeing you at our events this month! - Susie Gordon (Hon Programme Director)

3


RAS Lecture

Tuesday 21st January, 7pm

Tavern at the Radisson Xingguo

Liz Hingley: Portrait de Villes – Shanghai

Acclaimed British photographer Liz Hingley will speak about her Shanghai photography book, published in November 2013 by be-pôles as part of their Portrait de Villes series.

“I moved to Shanghai in July 2013, twenty years since line 1 of Shanghai’s metro opened. It is now the second largest metro system in the world. I was fascinated by how its development has dramatically changed the cities social, economic and geographical structure in the past twenty years. The 12 metro lines transport an average of

more than 7 million people daily. Twenty years ago, Line 1 handled just 1.06 million riders in the whole year.”

- Liz Hingley

LECTURES & WEEKENDERS

FOCUS GROUP MEETINGS

RAS Book Club 7pm Monday 20th

at Glo London (VIP Room) 1 Wulumuqi Lu, near Dongping Lu

乌鲁木齐路 1 号, 近东平路

‘No Ancient Wisdom, No Followers: The Challenges of

Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism’ – James McGregor

Members - 70 RMB, Guests 100 RMB

Includes a selected drink RSVP is essential as space is limited

[email protected]

Convenor: Sandy Strand

RAS Film Club 6.30pm Sunday 19th

at CHAI Living Gallery 370 Beisuzhou Lu, near Henan Lu

北苏州路 370 号，近河南路

Temptress Moon (1996)

Suggested donation: members 20 RMB – guests 50 RMB

RSVP is essential as space is limited [email protected]

Convenor: Linda Johnson

4


RAS Art Focus 2pm Sunday 12th

at OCAT Shanghai, 1016 Beisuzhou Lu, near Wen’an Lu

北苏州路 1016 号，近文安路

Insights into Chinese Contemporary Art

With the advent of the New Year, we continue our series “Insights into Chinese Contemporary Art” to understand

the phenomenon behind the hype and the mystic surrounding the state of current art in China.

Suggested donation: members 20 RMB – guests 50 RMB

RSVP is essential as space is limited [email protected]

Convenor: Julie Chun

RAS Study Group 7pm for 7.15pm

Monday 13th & 27th at Melange Oasis, Jiashan Market, 550 Shaanxi Nan Lu,

No. 37, Building D

陕西南路 550 号，近嘉善路

The Fall and Rise of China January 13th - Lecture 11: The Republican Experiment, 1927-1937 & Lecture 12: “Resist Japan!” 1937-1945

January 27th - Lecture 13: Chiang’s Last Stand, 1945-1949 & Lecture 14: “The Chinese People Have Stood Up!”

Suggested donation:

Members - 20 RMB, guests – 50 RMB

[email protected]

Convenor: Linda Ferguson

RAS Ad Hoc Study Group Wednesday January 15th

TBC!

FOCUS GROUP NEWS

Members and nonmembers gathered at Art + Gallery for the monthly RAS Art Focus event on December 8, 2013. In continuation of the series "Insights into Chinese Contemporary Art," Julie

Chun provided a lecture that examined the origins

of European Dada and Surrealism and discussed its impact on Chinese contemporary art. Then the

platform was turned over to Nial O'Connor, an Australian artist who has been living and residing in Asia for 8 years. With vibrant enthusiasm that is reinforced in his artwork, Nial explained how

Surrealism was used to inform his urbanism series

of Asia's cosmopolitan cities.

Full details of our events can be found at: www.royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

To book a place, please email the relevant Focus Group.

LIBRARY HOURS

JANUARY

Opening Hours

Wednesday: 8th, 15th, 22th, 29th (2pm – 5pm)

Saturday: 11th, 18th, 25th (2pm – 5pm)

Members may borrow two books Refundable Deposit: 500 RMB (cash)

Hon Librarian: Ed Allen

E-mail: [email protected]

The Sino-British College, USST 1195 Fuxing Zhong Lu,

near Shaanxi Lu

Shanghai, 200031 PRC

上海市复兴中路1195号

上海理工大学中英国际学院

5


RAS CHINA – BEIJING

Further details from Vice President Alan Babington-Smith

E-mail: [email protected]

Website: www.rasbj.org

RAS BEIJING Despite the onset of winter, the Royal Asiatic Society China, Beijing branch, had a hot roster of activities in December.

In RASBJ’s Dec. 4 event, EXPANDING HORIZONS, scuba diving expert Steven Schwankert introduced his newly published book “Poseidon: China’s Secret Salvage of Britain’s Lost Submarine”. The story about a British sub which sank off the Shandong coast in the 1940’s was unexpectedly topical; just days before the talk, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Chinese Territorial Strife Hits Archaeology: China Has Begun Asserting Ownership of Thousands of Shipwrecks in the South China Sea.” Schwankert’s fascinating presentation took place in the Shijia Hutong Museum, which was snug and warm despite the chill outside.

Then came a special walking tour of the Forbidden City, led by RASBJ’s Lars Ulrik Thom who co-founded Beijing

Postcards. On a bright, crisp afternoon, Lars regaled the group with tales of corrupt eunuchs and scheming

empresses, of lonely emperors and fragrant concubines. In contrast with most regular tours of the Forbidden City, this one was redolent with human anecdotes and details (like the opium dens inside the palace walls). The group wound up on top of Coal Hill, overlooking the majestic Gugong just

as dusk fell. They enjoyed a small, impromptu photo exhibition in the hilltop pavilion – and some welcome

glasses of fizz – courtesy of Beijing Postcards. Several policemen looked on warily, until one of them was recognised as a Beijing personality who had taught himself English by watching Hollywood films. At that point the cop broke into a huge grim and began mimicking English lines from American gangster films. Everyone shook hands. More glasses clinked. A pale winter sun set over the imperial

yellow roofs below.

The final event in December was a sold-out presentation, co-sponsored by RASBJ and the Bookworm, featuring Isabel Crook just two days after her 98th birthday. A huge crowd gathered to hear about her just-published book “Prosperity’s Predicament: Identity, Reform, and Resistance in Rural Wartime China”. Based on extraordinarily detailed surveys in Sichuan (now Chongqing) which Sichuan-born Canadian anthropologist Crook began in 1940, the book is a rich ethnographic study of a market town called Prosperity. She spoke eloquently about the research that she and two collaborators painstakingly pieced together. Professors Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig, who helped edit and compile the material, also presented vignettes of dynamics in the community, including an intriguing peek at the lives of “fugitive wives”. Numbering more than 120, the audience was one of the

Bookworm's largest ever, and a measure of the deep respect accorded to Isabel Crook and her extraordinary life.

As we face a new year, the RASBJ thanks members and friends for their support and wishes all the very very best in 2014! Asiatically yours,

Fergus Naughton (RASBJ Communications)

6


RAS China Monograph Series 3

Hong Kong University Press

COMING SOON

Mu Shiying China's Lost Modernist: New Translations and an Appreciation

Andrew David Field

When the avant-garde writer Mu Shiying was assassinated in 1940, China lost one of its greatest modernist writers while Shanghai lost its most detailed chronicler of its demi-monde nightlife. As Andrew David Field argues, Mu Shiying advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular

expression of May 4 giants Lu Xun and Lao She to even more starkly reveal the alienation of the cosmopolitan-capitalist city of Shanghai, trapped between the forces of civilization and barbarism.

Each of these five short stories focuses on the author's key obsessions: the pleasurable yet anxiety-ridden social and sexual relationships of the modern city and the decadent maelstrom of consumption and leisure in Shanghai epitomized by the dance hall and the nightclub. This study places his writings squarely within the framework of Shanghai's social and cultural nightscapes.

"Better than that of any other writer, Mu Shiying's fiction encapsulates the cosmopolitan life of 1930s Shanghai (with its foreign concessions, cinemas, cafes and cabarets) that underlay modernist Chinese writing. Andrew Field's book is exciting not only because it is a new appreciation of this writer but because, through its translations of Mu's stories, it reveals the extent to which Shanghai-based writing was inspired by the styles of international modernism." - Lynn Pan, author of Shanghai Style and Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise.

RAS China Monograph Series 4

COMING SOON

The Happy Hsiungs Performing China and the struggle

for Modernity

Diana Yeh

‘Try Something Different. Something Really Chinese’ The Happy Hsiungs recovers the lost histories of Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, two once highly visible, but now largely forgotten Chinese writers in Britain, who sought to represent China and Chineseness to the

rest of the world. Shih-I shot to worldwide fame with his play Lady Precious Stream in the 1930s and became known as the first-ever Chinese stage director to work in the West End and on Broadway. Dymia was the first Chinese woman in Britain to publish a fictional autobiography in English in the 1950s. Through exhaustive research and fieldwork among surviving family members and friends, Diana Yeh traces the Hsiungs’ lives from their childhood in Qing dynasty China and youth amid the radical May 4th era to Britain and the USA, where they became highly celebrated figures, rubbing shoulders

with George Bernard Shaw, James M. Barrie, H.G. Wells, Pearl Buck, Lin Yu Tang, Anna May Wong and Paul Robeson among others. Though fêted as ‘The Happy Hsiungs’, their lives ultimately highlight a

bitter struggle in attempts to become modern. “Thanks to the phenomenal success of his play Lady Precious Stream, Shih-I Hsiung was a household name in the US and UK during the 1930s. The Happy Hsiungs tells the story of how Hsiung and his writer wife, Dymia, came to be feted across three continents, enjoying celebrity as part of a global

cultural elite that included George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, H.G. Wells, Pearl Buck, Anna May Wong, Paul Robeson, Lin Yu Tang, and Chiang Yee. Yeh explores their role in representing China and Chineseness to the rest of the world forcing us to rethink our vision of the British Chinese as invisible and insular, with little social, cultural or political impact on wider society.” —Dr Anne Witchard, University of Westminster and author of Lao She in London and Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie.

7


RAS China - Monograph Series 1 & 2 with Hong Kong University Press

Both Lao She in London by Anne Witchard and Knowledge is Pleasure by Lindsay Shen are

now available on Amazon Kindle.

Hard copies are available for purchase at RAS events and during library opening hours. To

reserve your copies email [email protected] putting “Monographs” in the

subject box.

RAS CHINA JOURNAL 2013

(Vol 75 No 1)

Now published!

Our most recent journal includes a

wealth of articles including peer reviewed work by Paul Hansen, Ian

Gow, Paul French and Tess Johnston, as well as essays by Jeffrey

Wasserstrom and Peter Hibbard, plus book reviews of Décadence Mandchoue and Midnight in Peking.

RAS members receive one free copy available for collection at RAS

events and the RAS Library. Further copies are available at 80 RMB.

Special thanks go to all

contributors and to Earnshaw Publishers, for their support in

delivering this issue.

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.amazon.com/Lao-London-China-Shanghai-ebook/dp/B00993KZFE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1350273552&sr=8-2&keywords=lao+she+in+London

http://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Pleasure-Florence-Ayscough-ebook/dp/B009RP6LXE/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1350525471&sr=1-1&keywords=knowledge+is+pleasure

8


President: Nenad Djordjevic

Vice President: Tess Johnston

Honorary Secretary: Patricia Lambert

Honorary Treasurer: Peter MacInnis

Honorary Journal Editor: Neil Schmid

Honorary Librarian: Ed Allen

Honorary Programme Director: Susie Gordon

Council Members: Alexandra Hendrickson, Liz Jennings, Ian Crawford, Peter Harris, Duncan Hewitt, Sandy Strand, Katie Baker, Marissa Peacock

Ex Officio: Vice-President Beijing Chapter - Alan Babington-Smith

Ex Officio: Past President - Katy Gow

RAS China Monograph Series Editor: Paul French

Honorary President: Mr Brian Davidson, HM Consul General, British Consulate Shanghai

HON VICE PRESIDENTS

Carma Elliot CMG OBE Professor Liu Wei

PAST PRESIDENTS

2007-2011 – Peter Hibbard MBE

RAS Council Members 2013 - 2014

We extend heartfelt thanks to our recent sponsors:

9


MEMBERSHIP FORM

NEW [ ] RENEWAL [ ]

MEMBERSHIP Number: . . . . . . . . . . . .

QUARTER DUE: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

TITLE: Mr - Ms - Dr - Professor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

FAMILY NAME: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

FIRST NAME: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

NATIONALITY: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

E-MAIL ADDRESS: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

MOBILE No: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

PROFESSION: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

AREAS OF INTEREST and EXPERTISE: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

WOULD YOU be willing to help with RAS matters? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .

SIGNED: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DATE: . . . . . .

MEMBERSHIP CATEGORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FEE PAID. . . . .RMB

RECEIVED BY: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ON BEHALF OF RAS

MEMBERSHIP FEES

Residing in China:

Individual 500 RMB Joint 800 RMB Student 150 RMB Friend 1,500 RMB Patron 10,000+ RMB

Residing Overseas: Individual 350 RMB

MEMBERSHIP ELIGIBILITY Any foreign passport holder interested in Asian culture and in promoting the aims of the

Society may apply for membership. (PRC law prohibits us from admitting Chinese nationals.)

The Society operates a rolling membership system – membership is valid for one year

from the date of registration. Payments are only possible in cash – please remit your fee and completed form to a Council member at

one of our events.

[email protected]

january 2014 newsletter - royal asiatic society · 2016-01-05 · 2 royal asiatic society china –...

Documents