Yiyan
Wang

• Littérature

PROJET

MISSING NARRATIVES IN CHINESE HISTORY : MODERNITY AND WRITINGS ON ART, 1900-1930

Until the 20th century there was no word for “art” or “fine art” in the Chinese language. The word, the concept, and the European practice of art arrived in China at the beginning of the 20th century. By the third decade, a total transformation of art concepts and practice had emerged. In 1929 China’s first national art exhibition, sponsored by the Ministry of Education, was held in Shanghai with overwhelming success.

Leading contemporary intellectuals considered the art revolution an essential part of China’s trajectory towards modernity and actively participated in debate about art; but art historical events are still absent from the historiography of modern Chinese intellectual development. This project will produce the first book to document that intellectual debate over art, modernity and nation at the crucial historical junction between the last years of imperial China and the beginning decades of the Republican era (1900-1930). The resulting analysis will provide a new understanding of China’s unfolding intellectual modernity and, in particular, its correlation with colonialism and cultural nationalism.

BIOGRAPHIE

Dr Yiyan Wang is Professor of Chinese and Director of the Chinese Programme at the School of Languages and Cultures at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her publications focus on modern Chinese literature and culture. She is the author of Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World (Routlege 2006, 2012). She is currently engaged in two research projects: a. “Missing Narratives in Chinese History: Modernity and Writings on Art, 1900-1930”; b. “Local Stories and National Identity: Competing National Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Nativist Fiction”.

PUBLICATIONS PRINCIPALES

• 2013, “Jia Pingwa”. Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Fiction Writers, 1950-2000. eds. Thomas Moran and Ye Xu. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 111-120.
• 2013, “The Politics of Representing Tibet: Alai’s Tibetan Native-Place Stories”. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. vol. 25 no. 1 (Spring 2013), 96-130.
• 2013, “Chinese-Australian Artists on the World Stage”, Diasporic Chinesseness After the Rise of China. eds. Kam Louie et al, Vancouver: British Columbia University Press, 155-170.
• 2012, book chapter, “Modernism and its Discontent in Shanghai: the Dubious Agency of the Semi-colonized in 1929” in Bryna Goodman and David Goodman, eds, Twentieth Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday, and the World. London: Routledge, 167-179.
• 2011, encyclopaedia entry (6000words), “the Chinese Novel”, The Encyclopaedia of the Novel, ed. Peter Melville Logan, Oxford: Wiley Publishing House, 2011, 178-180.
• 2010, book chapter, “Ruthless Tyrant or compassionate Hero?: Chinese Popular Nationalism and the Myth of State Origins” in Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley, eds, Global Chinese Cinema: the Culture and Politics of Hero. London: Routledge, 2010, 43-52.
• 2009, (with Y. Claremont and E. Rechniewski), “Modernism and the City: the Figure of the Flâneur in Three Modernist Literatures”, Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia. vol. 41, 57-73.
• 2008, Journal article, “Rules of Art: Cultural Citizenship and Multicultural Aesthetics in Australia”, Cultural Studies and Literary Theory, no. 16 (2008), 248-264.
• 2007, journal article, “Venturing into Shanghai: the Flâneur in Two of Shi Zhicun’s Short Stories”, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 19, no. 2 (Fall 2007), 34 – 70.
• 2007, journal article, “Literary Nativism, the Native Place and Modern Chinese Fiction”, Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, vol. 4, no. 1(2007)
• 2007, journal article, “Shanghai Modernity: Women and the Practice of Everyday Life”, Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 17, no 1, 2007: 173-188.
• 2007, “The Emperor and the Assassin: China’s National Hero and Myth of State Origin”, Media Asia, (Nanyang Technical University, Singapore), Vol. 34, No. 1 (2007), pp. 14-19.
• 2006, book, Narrating China: the Fictional World of Jia Pingwa, London: Routledge.