New Perspectives Talk: Hung Liu's Re-presentations of Historical Photographs

In “Toward a ‘Bent Ornamentalitism’: Hung Liu’s Re-presentations of Historical Photographs,” Zihan Feng, PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in Arts & Sciences, discusses the Chinese-born American contemporary artist Hung Liu’s reuse of historical portrait photographs of Chinese women in her prints and assemblages. This talk explores how Liu strategically juxtaposes historical portraits with varied imagery to reconceive distortions of female bodies—in particular, bound feet—as not merely historical evidence of gender-based violence but a “bent and ornamental” form of being against the patriarchal norm and Western ethnographic gazes. In resonance with scholar Anne Anlin Cheng’s rumination that the “flesh” of racialized and gendered Asian women often survives through “synthetic, ornamental personhood,” Feng discusses how re-presentations of historical images of racialized and gendered subjects negotiate the realms of violence and aesthetics and interrogate the intricate association between natural bodies and the modern notion of subjectivity and autonomy.

Free and open to the public. Registration is requested.