New Books in Art

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films.Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida. He is author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol and Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary.Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The first monograph devoted to women artists of the Republican period, The Golden Key: Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949) (Brill, 2020) , authored by Amanda Wangwright, recovers the history of a groundbreaking yet forgotten force in China's modern art world. Through its detailed examination of the lives and careers of six female artists—Guan Zilan, Qiu Ti, Pan Yuliang, Fang Junbi, Yu Feng, and Liang Baibo—this book argues that women were central to the emergence of modernist art in early twentieth-century China and to the nation’s larger modernization project. Amanda S. Wangwright’s analysis of a wealth of primary sources demonstrates how these women constructed public personas, negotiated space within art societies, applied feminist thought to their artistic praxis, and surmounted obstacles to their careers—wielding art as the “golden key” to professional advancement and gender equality.Huiying Chen is an Assistant Professor in History at Purdue University. She is interested in the circulation of people, goods, and ideas and how societies in history and today cope with the challenges wrought by increased travel in aspects of culture, politics, commerce, law, science, and technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

A bold reorientation of art history that bridges the divide between fine art and material culture through an examination of objects and their uses art history is often viewed through cultural or national lenses that define some works as fine art while relegating others to the category of craft. Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History (Princeton UP, 2022) points the way to an interconnected history of art, examining a broad array of functional aesthetic objects that transcend geographic and temporal boundaries and challenging preconceived ideas about what is and is not art. Avoiding traditional binaries such as East versus West and fine art versus decorative art, Edward Cooke looks at the production, consumption, and circulation of objects made from clay, fiber, wood, and nonferrous base metals. Carefully considering the materials and process of making, and connecting process to product and people, he demonstrates how objects act on those who look at, use, and acquire them. He reveals how objects retain aspects of their local fabrication while absorbing additional meanings in subtle and unexpected ways as they move through space and time. In emphasizing multiple centers of art production amid constantly changing contexts, Cooke moves beyond regional histories driven by geography, nation-state, time period, or medium. Beautifully illustrated, Global Objects traces the social lives of objects from creation to purchase, and from use to experienced meaning, charting exciting new directions in art history.Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones (John Murray/Penguin, 2022) by Hettie Judah is a beautifully designed collection of true stories/essays about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared history.The earliest scientists ground and processed minerals in a centuries-long quest for a mythic stone that would prolong human life. Michelangelo climbed mountains in Tuscany searching for the sugar-white marble that would yield his sculptures. Catherine the Great wore the wealth of Russia stitched in gemstones onto the front of her bodices.Through the realms of art, myth, geology, philosophy and power, the story of humanity can be told through the minerals and materials that have allowed us to evolve and create. From the Taiwanese national treasure known as the Meat-Shaped Stone to Malta’s prehistoric “fat lady” temples carved in globigerina limestone to the amethyst crystals still believed to have healing powers, Lapidarium is a jewel box of sixty far-flung stones and the stories that accompany them. Together, they explore how human culture has formed stone, and the roles stone has played in forming human culture.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

When Kasimir’s Malevich’s Black Square was produced in 1915, no one had ever seen anything like it before. And yet it does have precedents. In fact, over the previous five hundred years, several painters, writers, philosophers, scientists, and censors alighted on the form of the black square or rectangle, as if for the first time. Foreshadowed: Malevich’s "Black Square" and Its Precursors (Reaktion Books, 2022) explores the resonances between Malevich’s Black Square and its precursors, revealing layers of meaning that are often overlooked but which are as relevant today as ever.In this interview, Allison Leigh explores these ideas with Andrew Spira. Their conversation ranges from how Andrew chose the overall structure for the book and his process of researching it, to why Malevich’s canvas should be seen as one of the most interesting and beautiful paintings ever made.Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The two parallel Palace Museums in Beijing and Taiwan, and their separate collections of thousands of precious artworks and artifacts from imperial times, reflects a key moment in the 1940s when the Republic of China and the People’s Republic became distinct entities. But the very survival of these vast troves of porcelain, sculpture, jade, paintings, books and many other items up to that moment was far from guaranteed given the epochal events unfolding across East Asia in the early part of the twentieth century.In Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City (Atria Books, 2022), Adam Brookes tells the story of the evacuation and survival of these delicate ‘treasures’, which during the 1930s to the 1940s travelled from their erstwhile palace home thousands of miles into western China, following rivers, railways and roads to evade the tides of war and revolution which threatened to catch up with and destroy them. Marshaled by attentive and often very brave curators, these objects and their improbable physical and symbolic journeys offer – in Brookes’ vivid telling – an extraordinary and revealing perspective on a critically important era of imperial collapse, civil war and foreign invasion.Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Monica Juneja and Sumathi Ramaswamy's Motherland: Pushpamala N.'s 'Woman and Nation' (Roli Books, 2022) examines Motherland, an important series of photo-performances by the acclaimed artist Pushpamala N. on the Indian nation personified as woman, mother, and goddess. The series shows Pushpamala taking on Mother India's myriad personifications: nubile beauty and saintly renunciant; militant goddess wearing a garland of skulls or receiving the ultimate sacrifice of a warrior's head; the mother-surgeon activating the birth of model citizens; and destitute widow, bent from years of abject labor. As she does so, she reveals that nations are invented, as are national embodiments. The artist's burden is to reveal the ingredients of such inventions.Ujaan Ghosh is a graduate student at the Department of Art History at University of Wisconsin, Madison Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair (Duke UP, 2022), Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary films, and photography as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, from the nineteenth century to the present, Cobb shows how the racial distinctions ascribed to people of African descent become simultaneously visible and tactile. Whether examining Soul Train’s and Ebony’s promotion of the Afro hairstyle alongside styling products or how artists such as Alison Saar and Lorna Simpson underscore the construction of Blackness through the representation of hair, Cobb foregrounds the inseparability of Black hair’s look and feel. Demonstrating that Blackness is palpable through appearance and feeling, Cobb reveals the various ways that people of African descent forge new relationships to the body, public space, and visual culture through the embrace of Black hair.Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP, 2021), Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. Iheka shows how, through visual media such as film, photography, and sculpture, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. Among other works, he examines Pieter Hugo's photography of electronic waste recycling in Ghana and Idrissou Mora-Kpai's documentary on the deleterious consequences of uranium mining in Niger. These works highlight not only the exploitation of African workers and the vast scope of environmental degradation but also the resourcefulness and creativity of African media makers. They point to the unsustainability of current practices while acknowledging our planet's finite natural resources. In foregrounding Africa's centrality to the production and disposal of media technology, Iheka shows the important place visual media has in raising awareness of and documenting ecological disaster even as it remains complicit in it.Dr. Cajetan Iheka is a Professor in the English Department at Yale University. Before African Ecomedia he published Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature in 2018, which won two prizes - the Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the African Literature Association First Book Prize. Dr. Iheka has also edited the volume, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, and co-edited another titled African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space.Sara Katz is a Postdoctoral Associate in the History Department at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Few transportation maps can boast the pedigree that London’s iconic ‘Tube’ map can. Sported on t-shirts, keyrings, duvet covers, and most recently, downloaded an astonishing twenty million times in app form, the map remains a long-standing icon of British design and ingenuity. Hailed by the art and design community as a cultural artefact, it has also inspired other culturally important pieces of artwork, and in 2006 was voted second in BBC 2’s Great British Design Test.But it almost didn’t make it out of the notepad it was designed in.The story of how the Underground map evolved is almost as troubled and fraught with complexities as the transport network it represents. Mapping the Underground was not for the faint-hearted – it rapidly became a source of frustration, and in some cases obsession – often driving its custodians to the point of distraction. The solution, when eventually found, would not only revolutionise the movement of people around the city but change the way we visualise London forever.Caroline Roope’s wonderfully researched book The History of the London Underground Map (Pen & Sword, 2022) casts the Underground in a new light, placing the world’s most famous transit network and its even more famous map in its wider historical and cultural context, revealing the people not just behind the iconic map, but behind the Underground’s artistic and architectural heritage. From pioneers to visionaries, disruptors to dissenters – the Underground has had them all – as well as a constant stream of (often disgruntled) passengers. It is thanks to the legacy of a host of reformers that the Tube and the diagram that finally provided the key to understanding it, have endured as masterpieces of both engineering and design.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art