Chia-Ling Yang
Biography
Dr Chia-Ling Yang is Lecturer in Chinese Art at the University of Edinburgh. She researches principally on the Chinese painting, modern Chinese art and its interactions with Japan and the West. She received her first degree from Chinese Literature at the National Taiwan University and a MA from Art History at the University of Warwick and completed her PhD at the University of London (SOAS) in Art and Archaeology. Yang was Lecturer in Chinese Art at the University of Sussex and University of London (SOAS), a visiting scholar at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan and the University of Heidelberg, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship to research and teach in Art History at the University of Chicago. She also lectured at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum on Chinese Painting.
Title of Paper
Reconstructing Heritage: Culture-Making of Qing Yilao in Global Shanghai and Dalian
Abstract
After the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the yilao’s (the "old leftovers" of the Qing) attempts to re-construct heritage in global Shanghai and Dalian and their cultural productions, in terms of artistic publications, exhibitions, museums and monuments, are loaded with expectations extending from political legitimacy through social inclusiveness to encompass the commodification and marketing of local products. Their cultural activities entwined with concepts such as narrative history, re-invented tradition, monumentality, social harmony, and culture-making. By comparing the cultural ambiances in Shanghai and Dalain, this paper addresses heritage as a series of linked social, political and cultural practices in modern China. With the complex histories of the two chosen cities in terms of politics, ethnic and cultural diversities, their contemporary representations of that reviled pasts are implicated in the creation, re-invention and management of plural heritages that are in turn linked to geographic markers. My study also aims to question how the ideology of a 'Confucian East Asia/Confucian political order' and the polarisation of ‘indigenous tradition versus borrowed modernity in visual production’ have been promoted by the Qing loyalists through object displays and visual materials in the public space of ‘global’ cities of focus, and whose advocacy of "traditional" culture seemed antithetical to European-inspired modernist movements.