26/4/23 6pm at the Daiwa foundation, Regents Park, London – David Martin, Curator for Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, WA on Pictorialist Photography: Soichi Sunami & his Issei Contemporaries –
David F. Martin will discuss the work and international achievements of Issei photographers active in Seattle, Washington, in the early 20th century.
Martha Graham in Lamentation, 1930, Gelatin silver print; Soichi Sunami (1885-1971); Courtesy of the Sunami Family
He will focus primarily on Soichi Sunami (1885-1971) whose artistic career began in Seattle and continued after he relocated to New York where he became the chief photographer for the Museum of Modern Art. Sunami’s main interest was dance photography and his subjects included Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn and other iconic dancers of the period.
The Seattle Camera Club was founded in 1924 and held their first exhibition the following year. They became internationally recognized for their artistic or “Pictorialist” work as a group as well as individually. The key members of SCC were Hiromu Kira (1898–1991), Dr. Kyo Koike (1878–1947), Frank Asakichi Kunishige (1878–1960), and Yukio Morinaga (1888–1968). They exhibited in most of the prestigious international salons of the period, winning awards and having their work reproduced in important photographic publications and catalogues. The SCC became so well known that individual members ranked among the most exhibited photographers in North America.
With the exception of Sunami who was living on the east coast during WWII, the Seattle Issei photographers were interned at the Minidoka relocation centre (concentration camp) which collectively ended their artistic careers.
When World War II ended Chiang Kai-shek seemed at the height of his power-the leader of Nationalist China, one of the victorious Allied Powers in 1945 and with the financial backing of the US. Yet less than four years later, he lost the China’s civil war against the communists. Offering an insightful chronological treatment of the years 1944–1949, Parks Coble addresses why Chiang was unable to win the war and control hyperinflation. Using newly available archival sources, he reveals the critical weakness of Chiang’s style of governing, the fundamental structural flaws in the Nationalist government, bitter personal rivalries and Chiang’s personal lack of interest in finance. This major work of revisionist scholarship will engage all those interested in the shaping of twentieth-century history.
Coble is the James L. Sellers Professor of History at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
A rare edition of Soong Mei-ling (Madame Chiang’s diary extracts from the 1936 kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek. Entitled Sian: A Coup D’Etat and published in Shanghai in a limited edition by Kelly & Walsh in 1937. It was printed on specially-prepared Chinese handmade paper made from bamboo fibre. The silk cover has Chinese calligraphy in Chiang Kai-Shek’s own hand.
“Royal Naval Frigate off the coast of Macao”, an admittedly rather crude pen and watercolour, painted c.1805-1813 by Lt George Crichton, Royal Navy. Crichton was, I believe Scottish and after the Navy became Manager of the Edinburgh, Glasgow and Leith Shipping Company at Leith of Glasgow , Lanarkshire. His major claim to fame was that he proposed the idea of the Trinity Chain Pier that spans the Firth of Forth. From Macao to Edinburgh!
Some Shanghai silversmiths i’ve noted before include Wang Hing, Wo Shing, Hung Chong, Luen Wo, and Zeewo, Tuck Chang. Add to this list Zee Sung, yet another Shanghai based silversmith. There were many silversmiths operating in the first few decades of the twentieth century targeting mostly the tourist and Shanghailander trade. Many were originally Canton (Guangzhou) based tradesmen but moved north to Shanghai withb the growth of the fpriegn population and development of the city as a major stopping off point for ocean liners.
Silver butterdish – early 20th Century, circular, with domed cover and dished stand with three ball feet, chased with prunus blossom
For the next few weeks on The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf we’re getting into Maoism and starting with a small, but essential, biography of The Great Helmsman by the preeminent Sinologist of his generation, Jonathan Spence’s Mao….click here to read…to see all previous books click here.
Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier, in Zhapu. A wave of suicides and mercy killings ensued: rather than leave their families to the invaders, hundreds of women killed themselves and their children or died at the hands of male family members. British observers decried an “Asian culture” of ritual suicide. In reality, the event was sui generis—a tragic result of colliding local and global forces in nineteenth-century China.
Xin Zhang’s groundbreaking history examines the intense negotiations between local societies and global changes that created modern China. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world-historic political, economic, and technological developments transformed the textures of everyday life in places like Zhenjiang, a midsize river town in China’s prosperous Lower Yangzi region. Drawing on rare primary sources, including handwritten diaries and other personal writings, Zhang offers a ground-level view of globalization in the city. We see civilians coping with the traumatic international encounters of the Opium War; Zhenjiang brokers bankrolling Shanghai’s ascendance as a cosmopolitan commercial hub; and merchants shipping goods to market, for the first time, on steamships.
Far from passive recipients, the Chinese leveraged, resisted, and made change for themselves. Indeed, The Global in the Local argues that globalization is inevitably refracted through local particularities.
My Crime & the City column for Crimereads bounces around all over the globe, but occasionally is a place that might particularly interest China Rhyming readers. This fortnight’s edition is on Lhasa and the mysteries of Tibet…Click here to read…
