The Work of an Angry Man: Koon Yee-wan on Su Renshan's Defiant Brush

When Dr Koon Yee-wan, Associate Professor of Fine Arts, first gazed at the paintings of Su Renshan, with their thick black angry calligraphy, her reaction was immediate.

“I thought they were the ugliest paintings I’d ever seen. He knew how to paint and I didn’t understand why he would make his paintings this way,” she said.

The jolt of that reaction, though, led her down a path of discovery. She came to see that Su had a wider significance than her initial response gave him credit for. “I realised he was a very angry man. And the idea of anger in Chinese painting is something completely different from before.”

Su was of the scholarly class, but he had a contrary temperament. He failed his exams and refused to take them again, and some years later his father had him imprisoned for filial impiety for reasons that remain unclear.

More importantly, he was working in a time of turmoil. China had suffered humiliating defeat after the First Opium War in the 1840s and southern China, where Su lived, bore the brunt of the effects. The area was also plagued by pirates. With all this going on, Su had little regard for the Confucian values expected of an educated man of his times.

“He was a self-imposed outsider. He questioned the whole system of education and he made lots of angry paintings with calligraphy saying Confucius was a robber, a thief, a bandit who opened the doors to hell.

“He’s generally known as a madman or genius who was responding to the times and who saw the need for change,” Dr Koon said.

New twists on an old art form

Su’s response included bringing new ideas and forms into his paintings that challenged the value of traditional ink painting at the time. Apart from writing long, irate commentaries about Confucius, he adopted strong graphic images such as zigzags and circles for things like waterfalls, and played with conventional images. Women had a special place in his paintings because he thought they should have a more important role in society. In one painting, he depicted the traditional Chinese New Year gods as women.

“I wouldn’t call him a feminist because that idea didn’t exist then, but he was challenging the status quo of accepted beliefs and long-held values that had been going on since the 12ᵗʰ century,” Dr Koon said.

She believes his daring work could be a missing link in Chinese art history between the traditional style that prevailed during the late 18ᵗʰ century and the modernist vibrant art that emerged in Shanghai in the 1860s. Su’s unusual style and location made him an ideal candidate to bridge the two periods.

Political turmoil aside, Guangzhou in the 1800s was a hub of commerce and merchants were emerging as the main patrons of art, as opposed to the imperial court which continued to favour landscape painters. Merchants also had more money to spend and travelled to Shanghai and other ports.

“I think Guangzhou was very active in the transition away from the landscape literati tradition. Art that is less literati-based, more colourful and draws more on folk traditions and auspicious images has always been patronised by merchants,” she said.

A man of his times, and all times

This art has generally been ignored by art historians, who typically regard 19ᵗʰ century Guangzhou as a centre of ‘export art’ – of oil paintings depicting life in China aimed at Westerners interested in knowing more about the country or collecting souvenirs – rather than a place of serious art.

But Su was a serious artist and Dr Koon said his blending of classical and modernist styles made him a pivotal figure in the transition to the Shanghai art scene.

Interestingly, his work re-emerged in Hong Kong in the second half of the last century, when exhibitions of Su’s paintings were held in the wake of the 1967 riots and again in the approach to the handover. Tellingly, these were times when people were contemplating their Cantonese identity.

“He becomes a nice mouthpiece for a claim of individuality because that was what he was doing in his own time and it resonates with people,” Dr Koon said.

See original article at: http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/2013_Dec_Vol.15_No.1/cover_story/page4.html

Dr Koon's book, A Defiant Brush: Su Renshan and the Politics of Painting in Early 19th-Century Guangdong, was published by HKUPress. Please click on the following link to access the publisher's page:

http://www.hkupress.org/Common/Reader/Products/ShowProduct.jsp?Pid=1&Version=0&Cid=16&Charset=iso-8859-1&page=-1&key=9789888139613

Imagining Nuns and Saints: Maureen Sabine and Carolyn Muir on Christian Icons

Portrayals of two Christian icons – the nun and the saint – are explored in new books by Faculty of Arts scholars. Professor Maureen Sabine looks at nuns in film and argues that they’re feminist role models, while Dr Carolyn Muir considers the challenges of depicting mystic marriages between Christ and female and male saints in art. Coincidentally, both women retire this year after more than three decades with the Faculty, making their publications a capstone to their HKU careers.

Lifting the veil

The actress Audrey Hepburn gave her finest performance in 1959’s The Nun’s Story, as a willful young nun who struggles with her vows in the 1930s and 1940s. The film was well received upon release but subsequently dismissed by feminist critics. That reaction puzzled Professor Maureen Sabine, who was educated by nuns. In response, she has written Veiled Desires, a detailed analysis of the portrayal of nuns in film.

“I became interested in this hostility to the film and in re-interpreting it,” she said. “Here is a heroine – although she’s a cloistered nun, she’s very intelligent and career orientated. She’s an individualist with an integrity resisting institutional conformity. It struck me that’s one definition of a feminist.”

“Feminists see the vow of obedience and conclude that nuns are handmaidens of a patriarchal church. But what they often forget are their bold pioneering activities – in America they built the infrastructure of the Catholic church and ran the parochial school system and the hospitals.”

Professor Sabine found many examples of cinematic nuns who defied the submissive stereotype, such as Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St Mary’s and even Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. They all showed a strong undercurrent of sexuality – a life force that is a reminder that nuns are also women with passion and purpose.

“The drive you see in the cinematic nun is a reflection of eros, of reaching out, and this appeals to the public. In The Sound of Music, for instance, you have aspiration, restless desire, a search for something more in songs like Climb Every Mountain.”

“These actresses are calling attention to this erotic drive and how it might be channelled into religious life and service.”

Professor Sabine explores her topic through a variety of academic lenses, including literary analysis, feminist history and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, theology, religious history and film criticism. “It turned out to be the most difficult project that I have done,” she said, “but I really enjoyed it.”

Veiled Desires is published by Fordham University Press.

Married to Christ

Christianity is rich in allegorical images and when Dr Carolyn Muir stumbled across a story of a ‘mystic marriage’ between St Catherine of Alexandria and Jesus Christ, she was intrigued. How do you translate this abstract idea of unifying the soul with god into an image? Especially when, as she subsequently found, both male and female saints ‘married’ Christ.

“In the 13th and 14th centuries there were a lot of individual mystics who wrote very graphically about having mystical unions. This is a theological concept you can find in many religions, not just Christianity, but here you also have this gender factor. You can gloss over the text as an allegory, but what do you do when you have to depict it? And who looked at these images?” she said.

Dr Muir studied published and unpublished materials and determined there were certain conventions in mystic marriage imagery. Female saints, represented by St Catherine and St Agnes, are shown marrying Christ as a baby based on a vision St Catherine had of the infant Christ giving her a ring after she converted to Christianity. Male saints, represented by St John the Evangelist and St Bernard of Clairvaux, are depicted embracing an adult Christ.

The two images are combined in Henry Suso, who was beatified but never made a full saint. He wrote about his love and marriage to ‘Eternal Wisdom’. Wisdom is female in the Old Testament but identified with Christ in the New Testament, so Suso’s mystic union crosses gender boundaries.

“There are very rare images of Suso wedding Christ who is depicted as a woman,” Dr Muir says. “In terms of the conventions, there’s a ring ceremony but there’s also emotional and physical intimacy.”

As to who looked at these images,14th century nuns were quite keen on them. “St John was one of their favourites and one nun was said to have levitated in front of a sculpture showing his mystic union with Christ,” noted Dr Muir.

Her findings, and the images, are contained in her new book, Saintly Brides and Bridegrooms: The Mystic Marriage in Northern Renaissance Art, published by Brepols Publishers.

See original article: http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/2013_Jun_Vol.14_No.3/books/index.html

Giving Voice to the Migrant's Memory

Plenty of films from Hong Kong and China deal with crossing borders and taking up a life in a strange, new place. But to Dr Esther Yau, a scholar of these films and a migrant herself (she spent 26 years in Los Angeles before returning to Hong Kong a few years ago), what has been missing is a more authentic voice.

Earlier this year she launched a project, Migration and Memory, to help young migrants tap into that voice and express themselves in words and images.

“These personal stories make up what we can call cultural memory,” Dr Yau said. “The disruption and tensions of the migration experience make it easy to become silent about that experience or be locked into feelings of homesickness or nostalgia or cultural alienation. We want to recognise the value of these individuals who are not socially prominent but whose stories make up a rich and varied layer of cultural memory in this city.”

Examples of cultural memory include what it means to leave grandparents behind, or to return to one’s home village and find that modernisation and development have erased favourite places from childhood. It also encompasses the experience of getting to know a new city and its places and people.

“We’re trying to elicit not just the memories of moving, but the before and after, and what sense people make of it,” said Dr Yau, who is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature.

Learning to express themselves

The project was delivered this spring using HKU student volunteers who were trained by Dr Yau and her team to help draw out young people’s memories and encourage them to express these in a creative way.

Workshops were organised for primary and secondary school students in collaboration with Neighbourhood Advice Action Council centres in Tai Po and Tung Chung, where there are large numbers of migrant families.

Each group was given two two-hour sessions where they played games, such as imagining the migration of a certain fruit to Hong Kong, interviewed each other to understand different cultures, and used different materials to express their own memories. A six-year-old boy, for instance, made a paper horn because he remembered his father playing the musical instrument in Indonesia before they came to Hong Kong.

Others wrote poems or prose about their migration stories, in Chinese or English, and simply the production of these was revealing.

“The older students in particular did not like to talk about their experiences in China in the workshops and it was only when they wrote creatively that they revealed where they came from. It seems they wanted to be seen to be like everybody else, and they saw it as a stigma to be new or different,” Dr Yau said.

We’re creating a public space for the inclusion, sharing and celebration of migration experiences and I believe this will enrich the long-term development of Hong Kong’s
cultural memory.

Dr Esther Yau

Sharing contributes to a ‘cultural memory’

Selections of the participants’ work have been posted on a special website to make them accessible to the public and to get people thinking about migration in all its forms. The contributions range from the personal to the allegorical, and some have been created in collaboration with parents.

Other members of the community have also been welcome to submit work. For instance, one man, Bong, writes about moving to the UK as a child, returning to Hong Kong as an adult, and wanting to return to the UK again. Another poster, Dreamy, writes thoughtful poems about changes going on in Hong Kong society.

Members of the public are welcome to submit their own migration memories, Dr Yau said. The website will be up until next summer and it will be updated with new entries several times before then.

The material will also be used in a course she teaches on film culture, which covers the concept of migration memory.

“These creations are a resource when you consider the relationship between offscreen memory and onscreen memory. They give you the perspective of people who are learning to express themselves in a way which may be fragmented and not very polished but embodies their experiences.

“We’re creating a public space for the inclusion, sharing and celebration of migration experiences and I believe this will enrich the long-term development of Hong Kong’s cultural memory,” she said.

The ‘Migration Memory and Our Hong Kong’ website is at http://www.complit.hku.hk/hkmmcn/

See original article at: http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/2013_Dec_Vol.15_No.1/cover_story/page6.html