2024-2025 Works in Progress Speakers and Abstracts

My first book manuscript, Girl Statue Rush: On Imaging Comfort Women, examines the decade-long multimedia articulations and global circulations of a public statue commemorating “comfort women,” victims of sexual violence during WWII. The book traces the Girl Statue (2011)’s journey from a singular memorial in Seoul to a commodified global icon. By investigating its proliferation—from balloons and miniatures to tattoos and AR media—I interrogate the tension between justice-driven activism and the commercialization of trauma. This work illuminates the paradox of visibility: as the statue gains ubiquity, it risks overshadowing the survivors it aims to honor. Situating the statue within broader discourses on art, activism, and memory politics, Girl Statue Rush offers a new framework for understanding the ethics of memorializing sexual violence in a consumer-driven world.
 

• SaeHim Park is an interdisciplinary scholar who earned her Ph.D. in Art, Art History, and Visual Studies from Duke University, with graduate certificates in Information Science, East Asian Studies, Feminist Studies, and College Teaching. Her primary research investigates the politics of representing sexual violence under Japanese and U.S. imperialism. Her ongoing work explores water, media, and crip ecologies in the Asia-Pacific, informed by her experience as a professional underwater diver.
• Discussant: Thomas Lamarre, Gordon J Laing Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College, University of Chicago

This talk attempts a literary history of women and verisimilitude in the statues and murals of Chinese deity-temples. Even from the earliest layers of the pre-Qin literary canon, encounters with beguiling temple images, and with ambiguously present goddesses, engendered both iconographic rhapsody and ontological doubt in male writers. However, I here focus centrally on a now almost entirely lost and forgotten space within early-modern Chinese temple architecture, the “rear palace” (hougong) or “palace of repose” (qingong). From the late Tang onward, a new class of deity-temple began to incorporate special shrine rooms concealed behind the main altar, in which uncannily realistic images of women and domestic objects provoked both aesthetic and supernatural response. With the introduction of European visual techniques like point-perspective, cast-shadows, and chiaroscuro from the eighteenth century onward, these “rear palaces” became important sites of sub-elite artistic experimentation, in which temple artisans employed European techniques to structure iconic trespass between the alteric and the domestic, here and elsewhere. With this architectural and pictorial narrative as a historical background, I read a series of key scenes in the great Ming-Qing novels, in which transgression into these dangerously “realistic” temple spaces forms a central signifier and conceptual model of literary fictionality itself.

• Hannibal Taubes completed his PhD in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department of UC Berkeley in fall 2024. He is currently a maternity-leave lecturer at the University of Bristol in the UK.
• Discussant: Aurelia Campbell, Associate Professor, East Asian Art History, Boston College

In 1920, Murakami Kagaku (1888-1939) created a work now regarded as a landmark of modern Japanese-style painting (Nihonga) today: a portrait of a semi-nude woman of ambiguous ethnicity, simply titled Nude (Rafu-zu). Drawing from diverse sources of religious art from Italian painting to Indian Buddhist art, Nude represented Murakami’s audacious departure from conventional depictions of beautiful women (Bijin-ga) to portray what he idealized as an “eternal woman” that embodied both spirituality and eroticism; a “harmony of both spirit and body” as he described. The artist’s provocative approach came as no surprise. Since the turn of the twentieth century, multiple artists had re-examined the female form in Nihonga, taking inspirations from unexpected sources to challenge traditional notions of feminine and religious beauty. In this paper, I examine Murakami’s Nude within the context of two significant groups of artists who explored female figural forms during this period (1900-1920). The first group comprised expatriate Japanese artists associated with renowned art promoter Okakura Kakuzō. Answering Okakura’s call to modernize Buddhist paintings, these artists traveled to India for inspiration, adapting its iconographies to create exotic female Buddhist figures. The second included Murakami’s colleagues from the National Painting Creation Association (Kokuga Sōsaku Kyokai), who implemented figural conventions from Western art to challenge the boundaries of Bijin-ga painting. By contextualizing Nude within these overlapping developments, this paper illuminates how Murakami’s painting reflected changing perspectives towards femininity and spirituality in modern Japanese painting, as well as the artist’s personal outlook in combining religiosity with provocative female figures.

• Chao Chi, Chiu received his Ph.d in art history from the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He specializes in modern Japanese art and Japan’s transcultural interactions. His recent dissertation examines Indian influences on twentieth century Japanese Buddhist art.
• Discussant: John Szostak, Associate Professor of Japanese Art History, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa 

Numerous records of donorship highlight court ladies’ active involvement in Buddhist devotional and material culture during the late Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) and beyond. However, previous studies have often marginalized these women due their lower status in both society and the institutionalized religious hierarchy. It is crucial to explore what these women achieved beyond the constraints imposed by the palace women system and societal norms, and to understand their role as creative agents of devotional and material culture, in order to draw a fuller picture of Korean Buddhism on the ground. This talk focuses on a distinctive type of court ladies’ donations—small-scale textile pouches—which have been largely overlooked in art historical scholarship. These pouches are integral to the material culture surrounding the Korean bokjang (literally “abdominal cache”), or the ritual practice of consecrating Buddhist icons by inserting objects of symbolic meaning into their inner recesses. Designed to hold consecratory deposits for Buddhist paintings and textile banners, these pouches were often richly decorated with various designs, frequently featuring embroidery—a medium traditionally linked to female craftsmanship and virtue. While typically discussed in isolation as textiles or boudoir crafts, bokjang pouches reveal the ways in which court ladies and lay Buddhist women of the 19th and 20th centuries actively participated in the creation of their objects of worship. Their formal reinterpretation of bokjang pouches—gradually departing from the textual norms laid out in the ritual manuals—demonstrates their contributions, or rather interventions, in the domain reserved for male monastic specialists.

•  Seunghye Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Art History at Dong-A University in Korea. Prior to joining Dong-A, she served as Curator of Buddhist Art at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Korea. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago. Her research explores the interrelationship among Buddhist images, architectural spaces, and ritual practices in Korean and broader East Asian contexts from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. This focus led her to co-edit a special issue of Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie on the consecration of Korean Buddhist images, together with Professors James Robson and Youn-mi Kim, published in 2020. Another major theme in her scholarship is the role of women in the patronage, production, and use of Buddhist art in Korea. This long-standing interest culminated in a large-scale international loan exhibition, Unsullied, Like a Lotus in Mud, held at the Hoam Museum of Art in 2024. As the first exhibition of its kind, it reconsiders East Asian Buddhist art from women’s perspectives, transcending geographical and chronological boundaries.
• Discussant: Youn-mi Kim, Associate Professor of Asian Art History at Ewha Womans University

Mount Kōya, the headquarters of Shingon Esoteric Buddhism, has been an important pilgrimage destination for both men and women since its founding in 816. However, female pilgrims were prevented from worshipping at the temple complex in the same way as their male contemporaries until the early twentieth century. The nyonin kekkai (barrier against women) meant that women had to walk the nyonin michi (women’s trail) encircling the sacred precinct and worship at nyonindō (women’s halls) instead. Unfortunately, little is known about the individual women who visited Mount Kōya in the early modern period. By intertwining themes of gender, religion, art, and material culture, my research endeavours to uncover more about these women, what led them to make the trip, and how they spent their time at the temple complex. I use thematic analysis of Edo period (1603-1868) women’s travel diaries alongside prints and other material culture to uncover their personal and shared experiences and to visualise their pilgrimage at Mount Kōya. In this paper, I will introduce one woman in particular, Nishimura Misu, who embarked on a pilgrimage to a number of sacred sites in 1860 and recorded the trip in painstaking detail in her diary, Tabi no michikusa. I will examine what she wrote about her time at Mount Kōya, in both prose and poetry, alongside images from the Kii no Kuni meisho zue (Illustrations of famous places in Kii Province) in order to deepen our understanding of the lives and religious practices of Edo period women pilgrims.

• Sara Atwood is a second year PhD by Distance student in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her research explores Edo period (1603-1868) women’s pilgrimages to Mount Kōya. She is a recipient of the College Research Award and is a member of the University’s Edinburgh Buddhist Studies and Gender.ed research networks.
• Discussant: Laura Nenzi, Professor of Early Modern Japan and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Emory University