Nick Stember

The first #ChinaComx workshop last week was a great success! Engaged discussions, provocative questions, fun talks, and overall a greatly inspiring two-and-half days of engaging with lianhuanhua and other Chinese comics. Thanks to all participants for taking their time!

布衣中，問英雄。 王圖霸業成何用？ 禾黍高低六代宮。 楸梧遠近千官塚。 一場惡夢。 Standing in humble homespun robes, I question history's men of great esteem: What use were all your kingly plans; How long endured the tyrant's scheme? Palaces from the Six Dynasties Now fertilize the farmer's grain, And scraggly catalpa trees Mark loyal ministers' remains: All history is one bad dream.

Ma Zhiyuan 馬致遠 (ca. 1250 - 1312), "To the tune 'Bo bu duan'"

Another well-known one from pre-1949 is Cao Hanmei’s (Zhang Guangyu’s brother) adaptation of Jinpingmei, which Huang Dingru has written about recently: www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3...
Not sure if there is a translated version of the comic online though.

Zhang Guangyu's Manhua Journey to the West (1945) - Part 1 of 6 - Nick Stember Part 1 of 6 of a translation of Zhang Guangyu's 張光宇 (1900-1965) overlooked masterpiece, Manhua Journey to the West 西漫遊記.

Hi Jess! Just saw this. If you’re looking for iconic/important long-form Chinese comics, I would suggest Zhang Guangyu’s Cartoon Journey to the West (1945), which I’ve also translated on my blog:

www.nickstember.com/manhua-journ...

Sarah Dauncey @ Uni Nottingham considers affective visions of disability in the 2nd #BACS2023 keynote “Emotional subjects: Citizenship, identity and the emotional world of disability in China”

Leigh Jenco @ London School of Economics investigates moral responses to inequality in her paper “Validity and the Cult of Qing (Passion) in Late Ming Poetic Criticism” #BACS2023

Abandoned woman convention, meet the vulgar and unrefined husband convention 🔥🔥🔥

Kar Yue Chan @ Hong Kong Metropolitan Uni explores the poetics of grief in her paper “Epitomizing the Poignancy in Poetry and Cantonese Opera: “The Heartbreaking Poetry” of Zhu Shuzhen” #BACS2023

Moxuan Luo @ Uni Hong Kong kicks off day 2 of #BACS2023 with his paper “The Evolution and Political Imagination of "Wu Hu Jiang"(五虎將) in Ming and Qing Fictions”

Dylan K. Wang @ SOAS gets historical with his paper “Depicting Chinese Murders: Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee Mysteries as Illustrated by Himself” #BACS2023

Lindsey McLean-Melchor @ Uni Grenada considers the intersection of the personal and the political in her paper “Woman-Author, Woman-Subject: (Auto)biographical trends in non-fictional literature (2002-2019) by Chinese-British author Xue Xinran 薛欣然 (1958-)” #BACS2023

Yaqi Zhang @ Uni Leeds foregrounds the audience in her paper “A Case Study of the Reception of the Translation of Legends of the Condor Heroes Written by Jin Yong” #BACS2023

Mary Mazzilli @ Uni_of_Essex considers strategic self-fashioning in “Exophony, Translation, and Transnationalism in Sinophone contemporary writers” #BACS2023

Didn’t manage to get any pics—too much multitasking for my poor older millennial brain—but here are the abstracts for this fantastic panel #BACS2023

Yang Shaoyu @ uniofwarwick delves into micro-narratives of wartime life in her paper “Memory Lost and Revived: Representations of the Nanjing Massacre in the Novels of Chinese American Writers and their Self-Translation” #BACS2023

Karita Kan @ HongKongPolyU questions ‘the end of rural China’ in the first keynote of #BACS2023 “Seeds of change: Fifteen years of China’s rural transformation”

Yantao Sun (University of Leeds) investigates love and heroism in her paper “Reinventing ‘heroic sons and daughters’: a rising hybrid genre of web romantic fiction and the popularism imagination of self-community relationship in contemporary China” #BACS2023

Anna Antong Chen (University of Sydney) explores the mechanism of irony in her paper “The trauma narrative in Wang Xiaobo’s fiction: irony, memory and identity” #BACS2023

Will Gatherer (University of Queensland) gets meta with his paper “Anxiety in the anthropocene: Post-postmodernism and eco-consciousness within the contemporary novels of Ma
Yuan (马原)” #BACS2023

Finally, Yang Hao (University of Lancaster) will bring the panel to a close with his paper “A Happy Excursion Against the China's Digital Leviathan” which looks at the Taoist allegory of the “happy excursion” [xiāoyáo yóu 逍遥游] to counter digital hegemony in daily life.

Gao Shiyu (University of Edinburgh & Centre for Chinese Visual Art, Birmingham City University) will then turn to concerns about the constant threat of surveillance, espionage, and censorship with her paper “Surveillance Bodies in Contemporary Chinese Expanded Media Art.”

Next, Angela Becher (University of Liverpool) will present her paper “Decolonising virtual reality: Of Sinofuturism and other tales,” examining Sinophone media art that challenges dominant power structures and narratives in relation to the changes brought about by VR and AI.

Our first presenter will be Li Wenzhu (University of Alberta) , who will be presenting her paper “The Assemblage of Desire, Power, and Subjectivity in People’s Republic of Desire” which looks at the 2018 documentary by Hao Wu on live streaming in China, particularly on the YY platform.

I’ll also be chairing panel B5: New Media, New Art for #BACS2023, which will be held in the SE wing of Bush House, floor 2, room 10, Thursday 7 Sept 14:00 – 15:30.

You can find out more about the conference here: bacsuk.org.uk/conferences/... #BACS2023

Last but not least, Wei Hao Goh will conclude the panel with his paper, “Nothing Is Real: The Post-human in Gigant DOKU: LuYang the Destroyer (2021),” exploring a Buddhist-inspired rejection and affirmation of the fragmentary, transient self.

Turning the 1990s, Kang Jiaqi’s paper “‘China’s art world has the cold and the flu’: ‘Product art’ and the New History Group in 1990s Wuhan” will consider vocabularies of contagion and anxieties about globalisation in Wuhan in the early 1990s.

I’ll be kicking things off with my paper “Provocative Prototypes: He Youzhi and the artistic turn in early Reform era Chinese comic books” which looks at an attempt to square the circle of art and pop culture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts ca 1980.

My co-panelists will be Kang Jiaqi and Wei Hao Goh, and our chair will be Joshua Jiehong Jiang (Centre for Chinese Visual Arts, Birmingham City University). You can find us in the SE wing of Bush House, floor 2, room 12 from 16:00-18:00 on Friday 8 Sept.

For anyone who will be attending the British Association of Chinese Studies conference King's College London
(Thur 7– Fri 8 Sept), I will be presenting a paper for panel F8: Making Do: Politics, Tradition, and Identity in Postsocialist Chinese Visual Cultures. #BACS2023 (thread)