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- All Subjects: Asian studies
- Creators: Brown, Claudia
- Creators: Rush, James
- Resource Type: Text
Art historians typically consider Chinese porcelain a decorative art, resulting in scholars spending little time analyzing it as a fine art form. One area that is certainly neglected is porcelain produced during the late 19th and early 20th century during the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) into the early Republic period (1912–1949). As the Qing dynasty weakened and ultimately fell in 1911, there was a general decline in the quantity of porcelain produced in China. Due to this circumstance, porcelain of this era has not received the detailed analysis, characterization of styles, comprehension of themes, and understanding of patronage evident in other periods of Chinese porcelain production. Ultimately, limited research has been conducted to establish the styles associated with late dynastic porcelain into the early Republic’s establishment.
This dissertation utilizes a new perspective that considers the patronage of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) as a high point of late dynastic porcelain. Concrete documentation establishes that motifs were appropriated from Cixi’s painting, suggesting a direct connection between schools of painting and the imagery selected for porcelain during her reign. The porcelain Cixi influenced directly guided the porcelain produced during the Hongxian era (1915-1916), making Cixi’s patronage the key turning point from dynastic porcelain to early Republic porcelain. Utilizing predominately British collections, this study identifies the styles, symbols, and themes associated with porcelain of the 19th and 20th century, elevating late dynastic and early Republic wares to the status of fine art.
Over 700 Navy Chaplains served with Marine Corps units in Vietnam between 1962 and 1972. With an average age of 37, these chaplains were often twice the age of the young men with whom they served. More than half were veterans of World War II and/or the Korean Conflict. All were volunteers. The pathways these clergymen took to Vietnam varied dramatically not only with the Marines they served, but with one another. Once in Vietnam their experiences depended largely upon when, where, and with whom they served. When the last among them returned home in 1972 the Corps they represented and the American religious landscape of which they were a part had changed.
This study examines the experiences of Navy chaplains in three phases of the American conflict in Vietnam: the assisting and defending phase, 1962-1965; the intense combat phase, 1966-1968; and the post-Tet drawdown phase, 1969-1972. Through glimpses of the experiences of multiple chaplains and in-depth biographical sketches of six in particular the study elucidates their experiences, their understandings of chaplaincy, and the impact of their service in Vietnam on the rest of their lives.
This work argues that the motto the Chaplains School adopted in 1943, “Cooperation without Compromise,” proved relevant for clergy in a time when Protestant-Catholic-Jew were the defining categories of American religious experience. By the early 1970s, however, many Navy chaplains could no longer cooperate with one another without compromising their theological perspective. This reality reflected America’s shifting religious landscape and changes within the Chaplains Corps. Thus, many chaplains who served in Vietnam may well have viewed that time as bringing to a close a golden age of service within the Navy’s Chaplains Corps.
In this thesis, three chapters discuss the relationship between Chinese modern and contemporary art and the CCP. In my theoretical exposition, I argue that the artistic/intellectual subjectivity of modern Chinese artists gradually developed and changed during the conflict and struggle with the Communist rule.
In the first chapter, I introduce the biography and artistic creation of Chinese literati painters under the communist rule, exemplified by Wu Hufan吳湖帆. I analyze and demonstrate how the subjectivity of the traditional literati gradually lost strength under the pressure of nationalism, the disenchantment with modernization, and communism. In the second chapter, I focus on the Scar Art art movement of the 1970s to the 1980s, as well as representative artists and their works in this direction of art, such as Cheng Conglin程叢林 and Gao Xiaohua高小華. In this chapter, I use feminism and Foucault's political-philosophical theories to explain these visual expressions of the memory of historical trauma in Scar Art during this period. In Chapter 3, by discussing the works of two artists, He Gong何工 and Ai Weiwei艾未未, in the context of Foucault’s political philosophy, I argue that artists how to express their intellectual subjectivity and political resistance through their contributions to Chinese contemporary art.
This dissertation explores the representation of female imagery associated with the Yuan pleasure quarters by examining a reservoir of Yuan sanqu. Previous scholarship has studied this topic using either historical material or zaju drama texts but has more or less ignored the voluminous corpus of sanqu. Furthermore, scholarly inquiries of Yuan sanqu either have emphasized its development from the Song ci lyrical tradition or its colloquial features. In consequence, the complexity of sanqu as an independent literary genre has been neglected. Using the representation of female imagery of the pleasure quarters in Yuan sanqu as an entry point, on one hand, this dissertation examines the dynamics of this urban and textual space. On the other, it focuses on rarely-studied sanqu pieces and analyzes them in a new light. The pleasure quarters and the production of Yuan sanqu are closely related to each other. In particular, the pleasure quarters are both revealed through the creative process of sanqu and have established sanqu as a distinctive aesthetic experience. The first chapter will focus on women of the pleasure quarters from the perspective of their hierarchical distinctions in terms of beauty, performative nature, and desirability as companions. Chapter two discusses the representation of women of the pleasure quarters in Yuan sanqu. Distinctive from the exclusive focus on privileged outstanding courtesans in poetic and lyrical tradition, Yuan sanqu depicted women from different registers of pleasure quarters. Thus, the genre formulated a diverse picture of images, rhetoric, and modalities. Chapter three examines a major literary tradition mainly sustained by the Yuan sanqu tradition, which is the story of Shuang Jian and Su Xiaoqing. As one of the most important and widespread literary traditions at play during the Yuan, Yuan sanqu writers’ representation of this pleasure-quarters-based story manifests the fulness and diversity of Yuan sanqu as a distinctive literary genre. In the epilogue, I focus on a zaju script by Ma Zhiyuan and an anonymous song suite in relation to this story. By so doing, I intend to show how Yuan qu lyrics incorporated the poetic, lyrical, and dramatic traditions in a somewhat promiscuous way.