In Developing Mission (Cornell University Press), Joseph W. Ho offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space—tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People’s Republic of China.
When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war.
Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the United States.
Hey Barnes & Noble members – Preorder my new book HER LOTUS YEAR (out 11/24 from St MartinsPress) before 4/19 & get 25% off with code PREORDER25. NB: discount only available to B&N members (sign up here: barnesandnoble.com/membership/). Already a member? Preorder at: https://bit.ly/HerLotusYearBN
These images (below) are all interesting, not just for their intrinsic beauty as watercolurs, but their ownership. The paintings were all purchased, probably in Shanghai, around the late 1890s by Captain John Dewar (1866-1950), a ship master, born in Shanghai though probably of Scottish origins. In 1896 Dewar married Susan Smith Oudney (1875-1967) in Shanghai. Susan’s father was William Oudney (DOB: 1846), originally from Dundee (Susan too was born in Dundee), who became a sailor and eventually a master mariner owned two clipper ships involved in the China Trade. Her mother was Isabella Mawer.
John and Susan were prolific collectors (much of which was passed down through the famioly andhas recently been coming up for auction) and seem to have bought mostly Chinese paintings and objets d’art, including the items below…
Hsiao Chen. Hua (Fa) Mulan on Horseback, 19th century Watercolour
A large pair of Chinese ancestor portrait scroll paintings, c.late 19th century
A Chinese double ancestor portrait scroll painting, c.late 19th/early 20th century
A Chinese famille rose porcelain hexagonal brush pot, c.late 19th century.
A Chinese silver dragon bowl by Sing Fat of Shanghai. Embossed with a finely detailed flying dragon below a scrolling foliate border. Presented as a wedding gift in 1934 to Mr & Mrs C.G Satterthwaite, by Lo Po Chun & Lo Po Wa. I think Satterthwaite was actually the Reverend Satterthwaite and originally came from Wales.
The new collection of never-seen-before images by the 1930s/wartime correspondent in Asia Mel Jacoby, A Danger Sharedis now available here from Blacksmith Books. It contains an amazing array of photographs from Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macao, and Chungking as well as French Indochina, the Philippines and Australia. The pictures and Mel’s story are annotated by Bill Lascher and there’s an introduction by me. An exclusive run of images from Chungking, China’s wartime capital, ran in the South China Morning Post weekend magazine recently – here.
WHAT: Author Ian Gill unravels his family’s past and discusses his new book “Searching for Billie” with moderator Rianka Mohan (ONLINE)
WHEN: Wednesday, April 3, 2024 at 7:00-8:00 PM Beijing Time (ONLINE)
MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: Ian Gill’s first visit to Hong Kong takes an unexpected turn when he meets his Chinese mother Billie’s friends, colleagues and fellow ex-prisoners of war, lifting the veil on a tumultuous past in Shanghai and Hong Kong. He moves to Asia and unravels her intriguing journey: from controversial adoption by an English postmaster in Changsha to popular radio broadcaster in wartime Shanghai, from tragedy and a doomed romance in a Japanese internment camp to being decorated by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the United Nations. He discovers a great-grandmother in a determined English farm girl who ends up owning a well-known hotel on the China coast in the 1870s – and he finally meets his father for the first time on a Canadian island in 1985. The backdrop for this fascinating family story is China’s turbulent century between the Anglo-Chinese wars and the advent of communism.
MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Because of his mother’s circumstances, Ian Gill was conceived in a Japanese prison camp in Hong Kong in 1945 and born in New Zealand after liberation. With his mother, he spent his early life in England, China and Bangkok. After boarding school, university and joining newspapers in England, he worked as a journalist in New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, Hawaii (where he took a master’s degree as a grantee with the East-West Center), Hong Kong and Singapore for 14 years. In 1985, he joined the Asian Development Bank, a multilateral financing institution with headquarters in Manila. Over two decades, he travelled widely around the Asia-Pacific region, writing and producing video documentaries.
HOW MUCH: Free for RASBJ members. RMB 50 for members of RAS branches in London, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Seoul. RMB 100 for non-members. If you experience difficulty paying via Wechat, please try Alipay instead. You can also pay by credit card. Interested in becoming an RASB member? Please sign up at http://rasbj.org/membership/
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On view March 14 – May 15, 2024 10 West 18th Street 7th Floor, New York Open by appointment only: 646-838-4576 or 410-602-3002
Rare early photographs of Chinese women from the Loewentheil Photography of China Collection will be exhibited for the first time in New York as part of Asia Week New York. Dragon Women: Early Chinese Photography curated by Stacey Lambrow runs from March 14th – May 15th 2024. Admission is free.
Dragon Women: Early Chinese Photography celebrates the Year of the Dragon and the representation of women in the earliest photography of China. This is the first exhibition devoted to the depiction of Chinese women in early photography. The over 50 photographs selected from the Loewentheil Collection include the first photographic portraits of Chinese women, most made in the 1860s and 1870s. Many have never before been shown. The exhibition examines women’s place in society in the late Qing dynasty and their depiction in historical photography of China. It also presents work by the few known early female photographers of China.
Highlights include a rare photograph by the first known Chinese female photographer, Mae Linda Talbot, and works by Hedda Morrison, Isabella Bird, and Eva Sandberg Xiao. Masterworks include photographs by Chinese and international artists such as Sze Yuen Ming Studio, Pun Lun Studio, A Chan Studio, Lai Fong, John Thomson, and Thomas Child. The exhibition showcases the diversity of Chinese women and their experiences during the final decades of imperial China.
