Photography as Veneration: A Japanese Expedition to Chinese Buddhist Sites, 1930-1942

This talk examines the Mizuno Nagahiro mission to the Yungang Grottoes between 1938 and 1945, focusing on not only the photographs that the Japanese team produced, but also their photographic process in both the context of war and the history of expeditionary photography. The Japanese mission, I argue, was groundbreaking in its understanding and practice of expeditionary photography as veneration and as agent reenacting the iconicity of sacred images. In turn, this mode reminds us of the role that photographic mediation plays in art historical studies, while also demonstrating an alternative ontological understanding of the photographic medium in general.

Image: Hadachi Osamu at work in Yungang, Cave 19. 1939. Photo in  Nagahiro Toshio, Unkō nikki：Taisenchu no bukkyo sekō chiyōsa, 雲岡日記：大戰中の仏教石窟調查 (Yungang Dairy: War-time Expeditions to Buddhist Grottoes), Tokyo: NHK Press, 1988.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.

About the speaker:

Mia Yinxing Liu is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. Mia is a scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese art and visual culture, working on the intermedial dialogues between media including ink painting, cinema, photography, and other emerging image-making devices. She received her Ph. D. in Art History from the University of Chicago. Her researches have received many awards, including a Yale Postodoc, a Taiwan Fellow and a Getty Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 2022.

Mia is the author of the book The Literati Lens: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema (1950-1979) (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019), and many articles on film and photography in East Asia, for example,  “The Allegorical Landscape: Lang Jingshan’s Photography in Context” (Archives of Asian Arts), “The Surrealist and Documentary in Chang Chao-Tang’s Photography” (Art in Translation), the Nude in wartime Chinese cinema, and Springtime in a Chinese Ruins, Fei Mu's Xiao cheng zhi chun (Screen).

Currently she is finishing a book manuscript titled Lang Jingshan and the Transnational History of Chinese Pictorialism, focusing on the intermedial dialogues between ink painting and photography in modern China.