Contained Visions: Photography, John Thomson (1837-1921), and the Chinese Export Artisan

Contained Visions: Photography, John Thomson (1837-1921), and the Chinese Export Artisan

Speaker: Roberta Wue, Associate Professor, University of California, Irvine

Date: March 21, 2pm to 4pm

Location: EAS Lounge, 14th floor, Robarts Library

Can China and the Chinese be contained in an image? Acting as expert, traveler, and witness, the photographer John Thomson (1837-1921) appears to answer this question in the affirmative with the first photographic book on China, his monumental Illustrations of China and Its People (1873-74). However, alongside the documentary intentions of his photographs run complex interactions with earlier representations of China in the form of export, its producers and ways of seeing. This talk will address Thomson’s reproductions and imitations of the fanciful and fictive export image, and his engagement with the imagined Chinese artisan.

Roberta Wue is associate professor of Art History and director of the PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has published on painting, photography, print culture, and advertising in modern China. She is author of Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai (2014), co-editor with Luke Gartlan of Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan (2017), and most recently contributed to the 2022 Peabody Essex Museum’s exhibition catalogue, Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China.