This presentation will examine societal responses to air pollution in China through a discussion of ‘smog art’.
Key Information
Speaker: Thomas Johnson (Lecturer, University of Sheffield)
50 Shades of Grey: The Emergence of ‘Smog Art’ in China
Tuesday, 30 January, 6-8 pm
50 George Square, Project Room (1.06), University of Edinburgh
SYNOPSIS
Smog art, which refers to artwork that engages with the issue of severe ambient air pollution, has become increasingly common in China. It includes various art forms such as paintings, photography, and performance art.
This presentation is based on documentary data and approximately 20 interviews conducted with artists and curators in Beijing, chosen due to its poor air quality and high concentration of artists. It explores why artists produce smog art, how they navigate China’s authoritarian political environment, and the meanings they attach to their work—including the extent to which they view smog art as a form of resistance.
BIOGRAPHY
Thomas Johnson is Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. Before that, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong. His work examines environmental activism in China, and has been published in journals such as The China Quarterly, Regulation & Governance, and Environmental Politics.
Speaker: Thomas Johnson (Lecturer, University of Sheffield)
50 Shades of Grey: The Emergence of ‘Smog Art’ in China
Tuesday, 30 January, 6-8 pm
50 George Square, Project Room (1.06), University of Edinburgh
The image shown is a satellite picture of smog over Tianjin taken in 2013.
It searches for the Chinese common reader in three distinct places: in the materiality of cheaply produced texts-books as objects; in the usable-and wondrous-information packaged in their crowded pages—texts as meaning; and in the spaces where this knowledge was consumed—reading as cultural practice. The texts include cheap, string-bound, lithographed books such as wanbao quanshu 萬寶全書 (comprehensive compendia of myriad treasures), together with daily-use, letter-writing, household, and health manuals. Their contents include age-old cosmologies and fanciful representations of foreigners, together with treatments for opium addiction, methods for preventing cholera, and ways to graft a plant. The apprentices, workers, housewives, and lower-level bureaucrats who consumed this knowledge often did so on the fly, in the streets. Sitting, standing or leaning at street-side bookstalls, they avidly sought both the useful information and the marvelous diversion necessary to negotiate the epistemological uncertainty—and promise—of China’s revolutionary twentieth century.
Joan Judge is Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (2008), Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (1996), and co-editor of Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Global Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own? (forthcoming), and Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (2011). She is currently engaged in a project with the working title “In Search of the Chinese Common Reader: Usable Knowledge and Wondrous Ignorance in the Age of Global Science, 1870-1955″.
FAN Lizhu 范丽珠 is Professor of Sociology at Fudan University. Director of Globalization and Religious Studies. As a pioneer scholar on the study of sociology of religion in China, she has engaged in historical and ethnographic studies of Chinese folk religious beliefs, sociological theories of religion, and the study of the trends of folk religious beliefs in modern Chinese society. Her most significant works include The Religion and Faith Transition of Chinese in the Contemporary Era: Field Research of the Adherents of Folk Religion in Shenzhen; China and the Cultural Sociology of Religion (co-authored with James Whitehead and Evelyn Whitehead); Sociology of Religion: Religion and China (co-authored with James Whitehead and Evelyn Whitehead). Academic articles include “Conversion and Indigenous Religions in China” (Co-authored with CHEN Na) in the Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion; “The Cult of Silkworm Mother as a Core of Local Community Religion in a North China Village” in China Quarterly, etc.. As an internationally recognized scholar, she taught at many distinguished universities, such as University of Chicago, University of California at San Diego, Lund University, Queen’s University, New School, Wabash College, University of British Columbia, Bergen University, University of Stockholm, University of Tokyo, etc.
LI Zhiqing is Assistant Professor of Economics, School of Economics, Fudan University. His research interests are: Environmental & Energy Economics; Public Economics; Political Economics; Economics of Climate Change; International Climate Policy; China’s Modern Economy
Former Prime Minister of New Zealand and current Head of the Handa Foundation, Sir John will speak on the past, present and future impact of Chinese growth on political and economic relations in the Asia-Pacific region. Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2008-2016, Sir John led the country through the aftermath of the global financial crisis and a series of devastating earthquakes in New Zealand. Sir John worked in investment banking for 20 years primarily for Bankers Trust in New Zealand and Merrill Lynch in Singapore, London and Sydney where his posts included heading Merrill Lynch’s global foreign exchange business along with responsibility for European derivative trading and e-Commerce.
Aaron Moore will introduce the history of changing Japanese visions of the future, from its emergence as a rapidly modernizing nation in the nineteenth century to WWII, and its post-war embrace of peaceful technological innovations such as robotics and bullet trains. American-born Aaron Moore was appointed to the post of Handa Chair in September 2017. Before coming to the University of Edinburgh, he held the post of Senior Lecturer in Japanese and East Asian History in the University of Manchester. Prior to taking up his post at Manchester, Prof Moore worked at Princeton, the University of Virginia, and Oxford University.
Richard McGregor is a journalist and an author with extensive experience in reporting from east Asia and Washington as former Washington and Beijing Bureau Chief for The Financial Times. A 2015 fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., his latest book, published by Penguin Random House is entitled Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Region.