Image, Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Monuments in Greater China
Time & Location
28 Nov 2021, 16:00 – 18:00
Hong Kong Maritime Museum
About the Event
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Image, Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Monuments in Greater China
Language: English
Abstract:
Joint Book Talk: Co-organising with the Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University on one of the book talk series “Spatial Practices in Chinese Art History and Visual Studies”
Pan Lu's book explores five cases of monument and public commemorative space related to World War II in contemporary Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Through the study on the monuments, the project illustrates past and ongoing controversies and contestations over Chinese nation, sovereignty, modernism and identity.
Specifically, this talk focuses on the second chapter of the book, titled “Between Iconic Image and (Artificial) Ruins: Shanghai Sihang Warehouse and Chinese Modern Visuality of World War II.” Opened in 2015, Sihang Warehouse Memorial Museum is an architectural relic where the fierce and famous “Defense of Sihang Warehouse” during the Battle of Shanghai (August to November 1937) of the Second Sino-Japanese War took place. However, for a long time, the warehouse was barely used as a commemorative site in Communist China’s war memory narrative. This chapter endeavors to bring the warehouse space from the background of the much-studied battle per se to the foreground of its architectural history, painting, photographic and cinematic representations, and its current form of a rare spectacle of artificial ruins in war commemorative culture in present-day China.
Speaker’s Bio:
PAN Lu is Associate Professor at Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She was visiting scholar and visiting fellow at the Technical University of Berlin (2008 and 2009), the Harvard-Yenching Institute (2011-2012), researcher in residence at Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and artist-in-residence at ZK/U Berlin (2016) and visiting scholar at Taipei National University of the Arts (2018).Pan is author of three monographs: In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities (Bristol: Intellect, 2015), and her new book Image, Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Monuments in Greater China published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021.