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Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world?
Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.
— Wu Hung, author of Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China
Photo Poetics presents an encyclopedic treatment of the development of Chinese photography as cultural history. Wu considers this new form of image-text as a cultural artifact and an “intermedial” work of art with close connections with classical Chinese painting and poetry. This book is a major achievement and a milestone in the study of photo poetics.
— Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945
Photo Poetics is a magnificent pioneering work on the new technology of photography as it encountered indigenous Chinese visual and poetic aesthetics during the Republican era. Its sophisticated approach, comprehensive coverage, and interdisciplinary scholarship will strongly impact studies of comparative photography, intermedial and visual culture, and Chinese aesthetics.
— Grace Fong, author of Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China
Photo Poetics excitingly addresses hitherto-unnoticed tensions between modern media and premodern form in early Chinese art photography. Shengqing Wu expertly applies China studies paradigms while engaging with scholarship on Chinese poetry, painting, and modernity.
— Yomi Braester, author of Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract
There is an enormous amount to learn from Photo Poetics for anyone interested in restoring diversity to the study of Chinese culture from the first half of the twentieth century, for anyone needing to be persuaded that Chinese traditional culture did not perish after 1900, for anyone who enjoys exemplary cultural-historical research and, last but not least, for anyone who enjoys reading beautifully produced books with many wonderful images and with fascinating poems, printed in both their Chinese-language original and the author’s expert translation. This is a superb book.
— Michel Hockx
[This book has] tremendous value in shaping our understanding of how photography was perceived and used by the Chinese literati class in the late Qing and early Republican era . . . the book will serve as a useful encyclopedia and touchstone, inspiring further research.
— Jiangtao Gu
Meticulously researched and beautifully produced, Photo Poetics: Chinese Lyricism and Media Culture is a valuable addition to the growing scholarship on photography in China.
— Yi Gu
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Refashioning the Self
1. Multiplying the Self: Staging Fantasies and Cultural Personas
2. Envoicing the Paper Mirror: Autobiographical Moments
Part II: Emotions in Transit
3. The Social Life of Emotions: Photography and the Singularity of the Gift
4. Summoning Zhenzhen: Circulation of the Tropes of the Beauty, the Skull, and the Nude
Part III: Worldly and Otherworldly Visions
5. In Search of Soul: Psychical Studies and Spirit Photography
6. The Shadows of Poetry: Mediating “Interior Landscapes”
7. Inscribing Remembrance: Lyrical and Technological Envisioning of the Past
Epilogue
Notes
Index