Papers by I-Yi Hsieh
台灣人類學刊 Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, 2022
*For the English abstract, please see the last few pages of the PDF document.
本文探討2012年起，我針對北... more *For the English abstract, please see the last few pages of the PDF document.
本文探討2012年起，我針對北京「蟲魚花鳥市場」所進行的民族誌研究，描繪市場裡的收藏者與行家們，如何透過「與物之生（becomingwith）」的美學實踐，來面對城市周遭世界（umwelt）的急速變遷；透過緊抓住物所承載的歷史質感（qualia），讓身處當代北京的人們，即便人事全非，仍得以召喚隨著市場化而消逝的城市歷史感知。此間的「與物」，除了文玩物，還包含了動物和植物，這些與人們一起經歷當代中國市場經濟改革的「非人物種（non-human species）」，也成為了環境與時空意義的詮釋物（interpretant），「與物之生」則意味著透過空間感、觸覺，和聽覺這些感知行動，收藏者重新打造了一個相異於當代北京的時空感，而浸潤於「老北京」－清帝國晚期衰微世道下的懷舊風情－此一浪漫化了的象徵感知。當充滿了「與物實踐」的老北京懷舊市集，捲入了「國家計畫性市場化」，而轉變為超大型的收藏者市場時，這些遊走於物與人之間的核桃行家、蟲鳴師傅及金魚師傅，其「與物之生」，也捲進了商品經濟與物的威望（fame）象徵價值之間的擺盪。受到梅洛龐蒂現象學的「交織（chiasm）」思路所啟發，「與物之生」的民族誌希望能夠細膩地，同時批判性的探討中國市場化過程中，物的社會價值與人的象徵資本，兩者的交織與意義逆轉；以期回應市場化如何是一個不斷變化，危機四伏的歷程。
關鍵詞：北京，物，市場，都市變遷，周遭世界（umwelt
Global Frictions on Wet Markets
positions politics, 2022
This paper addresses the politics surrounding the rising concerns for biosecurity at Asian wet ma... more This paper addresses the politics surrounding the rising concerns for biosecurity at Asian wet markets. It points to the global frictions on wet market as a major food infrastructure for working class families in Asia. The disagreement on the merit of wet markets also indexes the urgently needed studies of labor history in Asian food infrastructure.
NEWSLETTER, Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, MOST Taiwan, 2020
Researching Art Markets: Past, Present, and the Tools for the Future, 2021
This is a draft of my article in the collective volume, Researching Art Markets: Past, Present, a... more This is a draft of my article in the collective volume, Researching Art Markets: Past, Present, and the Tools for the Future, edited By Elisabetta Lazzaro, Nathalie Moureau, Adriana Turpin. The book is set to be published May 26, 2021, with Routledge.
International Quarterly of Asian Studies, 2019
The Red House neighbourhood in the Ximen shopping district, located on the south side of Taipei, ... more The Red House neighbourhood in the Ximen shopping district, located on the south side of Taipei, has been the centre of the city's vibrant culture of sexual inclusivity and gay activism since the early 2000s. Next to the shining billboards at Ximen Square, the Red House presents itself as a reminder of the neighbourhood's historical transformation from a marketplace during the Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan (1895-1945) to a major pornography theatre in the 1970s-1990s, while emerging as a new urban centre for youth culture, entertainment and outdoor gay bars in the 2000s. Addressing issues of urban exclusion and inclusion, this paper fo-cuses on an HIV testing booth located in the Red House area. Based on interviews with social workers and drawing analyses from archival research, this paper reflects on the politics of a place of caring. Providing 15-minute HIV testing sessions free for anyone in the gay community , the testing booth is an outpost of the Taiwan AIDS Foundation, a nongovernmental organisation that receives public funds. Despite the fact that HIV tests are now widely available for purchase-even accessible from vending machines-the testing booth's cosy, discretionary and friendly manner renders it a place of caring, where one can be attended by social workers as well as receiving a consultation.
positions: asia critique, 2019
This translation introduces the life trajectory of Huang Wenshan— a first-generation Chinese anth... more This translation introduces the life trajectory of Huang Wenshan— a first-generation Chinese anthropologist who received education from Columbia University in the 1920s—and his reflections on the anarchist wing within Chiang Kai-shed’s Kuomingtang. Drawing on Huang’s semibiographical writing, published in 1983, about this anarchist network, the translated text centers on the event of the death of Wu Zhihui—another famed anarchist intellectual—which had evoked much discussion and correspondence among intellectuals in the circle. The text particularly shows Huang and his fellow anarchists’ struggle to redeem a sense of cosmopolitanism while their lives are engulfed by the turmoil of international and civil wars.
Against the backdrop of war, the translation further contextualizes Huang’s historical shift from anarchist politics to his focus on developing a unique theory of “culturology” since the outbreak of the Mukden Incident in 1931. This theory considers “culture” as central to constructing a new kind of cosmopolitanism, with which a commensurability can be achieved for all nations. Given the invaluable personal letters exchanged among the anarchists, annotated by Huang, this translated text provides insights into the “culture turn” among many Chinese anarchists in the wake of the Sino-Japanese Wars.
Keywords. culture, war, Chinese anarchism, cosmopolitanism
Asian Theatre Journal (vol. 36, no. 1: 101-121) , 2019
This paper discusses Japanese director Sakurai Daizou's theatre productions known as the "tent th... more This paper discusses Japanese director Sakurai Daizou's theatre productions known as the "tent theatre," a genre which first emerged during the Tokyo student movement in the late 1960s. The study focuses on Sakurai's collaborative productions, particularly the theatre's style and politics. Japanese tent theatres are distinctive in their combination of itinerary performance and temporary, guerrilla stage arrangement. Sakurai's theatre is a descendent of this tradition of political theatre; however, it departs from the other postmodernist Japanese aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s while rendering folklores mixed in avant-garde abstract fragmentations as its signature dramaturgy. This essay discusses Sakurai's unique insistence on collaborative productions in light of the international theatre network he and his troupe members established in Taiwan and Beijing since the early 1990s. The discussion of Sakurai's collaborative art practice will contribute to the conversation on the post-1968 generation of socially engaged art from a non-European perspective, challenging the scope related to the problem of reification.
「國際雙年展與城市藝術 (Biennale and Urban Arts)」，pp. 29 - 41, 台灣科技部人文與社會科學研究中心通訊 （2018-9）
*This is a conference paper presented at the 2016 annual meeting of TIAMSA, The International Art... more *This is a conference paper presented at the 2016 annual meeting of TIAMSA, The International Art Market Studies Association (July 2016, London)
This paper addresses the social economy created by 2016 Shanghai Biennale that ran from November 12, 2016 to March 12 2017. With the selection of the Indian curator/artist group Raqs Media Collective as the chief curator, the 11th Shanghai Biennale was structured around the idea to launch “the possibilities of South-South dialogue within the current scenario of a highly interconnected world.” Such an agenda has defined the selection of art works and artists presented in the Biennale – as works of video art, socially engaged multi-media installations, and performing arts being the highlights of the three-month-long show. Many events were convened around the city – including the 51 Personae Project, a collaboration launched with the local group Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society.
Instead of centering its curatorial philosophy on object-oriented conventions, the 11th Shanghai Biennale put forward an interrogation on the form of international biennale by challenging the Euro-American orbit, questioning how international art fair, or events of the equivalency, can be re-thought as a mode of production that pertains to social and aesthetic spheres at large. How does the biennale’s endeavor to convene these various video and performing events outside of the Power Station Museum, the main site for the biennale, speak to the imagination of the form of international biennale today and in the future? How does such a gesture expand an art fair outside of its temporal and spatial constraints? And how do the Shanghai art world respond to such an experiment that inverts the relationship between art and life? Addressing these sets of questions, this paper looks into how, with such a revision of the biennale’s relation to the global production of aesthetic economy, the 2017 Shanghai Biennale reconfigured its economic role inside and outside of the event.
Contemporary China Newsletter, Taiwan National Tsing Hua University , 2017
This paper discusses the collecting of literati walnuts as a way of cultivating nostalgic identit... more This paper discusses the collecting of literati walnuts as a way of cultivating nostalgic identity among many Beijing residents who yearn for the late-imperial, early Republican style of city life--centering on a local configuration of old Beijing masters (da ye), who delighted in Manchu Bannermen's social hobbies such as brooming caged birds, teahouse mingling, and cultivating walnuts. With the revival of this old Beijing figure and the life style in folk art marketplaces in the 2000s, these self-proclaimed old Beijing masters complicate the conventional consideration of the market as transactional in nature, featured by rationality and business calculation. These folk art marketplaces instead speak to post-socialist nostalgia anchoring upon things that convey the affective connection of old Beijing to their collectors.
This report considers the changing folk art connoisseurship in Beijing, set against the rise of p... more This report considers the changing folk art connoisseurship in Beijing, set against the rise of private collecting, Chinese folklore markets, and folklore connoisseurship in the 2000s. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, the report ventures into a case of Chinese literati walnut – a folk hobby associated with the ethnicity of the Manchus, whose leisure life style melted into the urban popular culture of Beijing in the early twentieth century. Built on the new materialism in anthropology, I address the contemporary walnut connoisseurs who are shaping a new market culture of folklore in Beijing. In particular, I ask how their connoisseurship mediates local material culture and the increasing trend of marketization. This ethnography sheds light on the material connections surrounding the literati walnut. I argue that, in the case of the literati walnut, human and things evolve together, creating and transforming the category of cultural collecting in time.
The Walnut Rubbing Chinese Gentleman: Ernst Cordes' Travelogue to Beijing, 1937. Blog, Journal of the History of Ideas
Conference Papers by I-Yi Hsieh
* This is a conference paper for the 2017 meeting of The International Art Market Studies Associa... more * This is a conference paper for the 2017 meeting of The International Art Market Studies Association (July 2017, London, United Kingdom)
This paper addresses the social economy created by 2016 Shanghai Biennale that ran from November 12, 2016 to March 12 2017. With the selection of the Indian curator/artist group Raqs Media Collective as the chief curator, the 11th Shanghai Biennale was structured around the idea to launch “the possibilities of South-South dialogue within the current scenario of a highly interconnected world.” Such an agenda has defined the selection of art works and artists presented in the Biennale – as works of video art, socially engaged multi-media installations, and performing arts being the highlights of the three-month-long show. Many events were convened around the city – including the 51 Personae Project, a collaboration launched with the local group Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society.
Commodifying Nostalgia: Beijing Folklore Markets in the Age of Privatization
This is a paper presented at the 2015 Neoliberalism Workshop, as part of the "Post-1945 Research ... more This is a paper presented at the 2015 Neoliberalism Workshop, as part of the "Post-1945 Research Collaborative" organized by the History Department at New York University.
The paper discusses the process in which the township-corporatism emerges in China's reform era, and how this new financial mechanism changes the system of landownership along with the privatization policy that has been implemented upon Chinese state-owned enterprises since the 1990s.
(Please contact me for a copy of this paper.)
"Developmental Heritage": Beijing Folklore Arts in the Age of Marketization
This paper examines the rise of folklore markets in Beijing, following China’s adoption of UNESCO... more This paper examines the rise of folklore markets in Beijing, following China’s adoption of UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage policies in 2003. Drawing from my Ph.D. dissertation, I examine the emergence of a new heritage world in China collaborated by governmental and semi-governmental agencies. My field site, two major folk art markets in the southeast side of Beijing, together house more than 1000 shops selling collectable hobby objects evoking nostalgic feelings of old Beijing. This paper provides an ethnographic investigation into this surging heritage commerce in China, and asks how the renaissance of folk arts becomes a new globalist agenda linking up China with the network of overseas Chinese communities.
(Please contact me for a copy of this paper.)
Nuts: Nostalgic Collecting and Collectability in Post-socialist Beijing
This is a paper presented in the 2014 AAA annual meeting in Washington D.C.. The paper is an ethn... more This is a paper presented in the 2014 AAA annual meeting in Washington D.C.. The paper is an ethnographic attempt to explore the trend of literati walnuts collecting in contemporary Beijing. Examining the rise of walnut connoisseurship, the paper discusses how the practice of literati walnut collecting creates a new heritage world connecting Chinese folk arts with UNESCO's world heritage cosmopolitanism.
Teaching Documents by I-Yi Hsieh
Globalization and Its Discontents: the East Asian Context
This course investigates contemporary Chinese opera as a specific context of the post-socialist a... more This course investigates contemporary Chinese opera as a specific context of the post-socialist and post-cold war transition, focusing on the politics of East Asian urbanity and statehood developed along this historical change. Contextualizing Beijing opera's entanglement with the twentieth century's urban modernity, this course introduces issues of genre developing, plot structure, character deployment, aesthetic features, fan culture, and the theatrical symbolism expressed in modern Chinese opera. Drawing on historical researches, literary studies, and anthropological theorization of theatricality, we will discuss how the contemporary reminiscence of certain aesthetic forms of Beijing opera emerges at post-socialism. While the contemporary global discourses of cultural heritage and preservation come to be involved with the resurgence of Chinese/Beijing opera, the genre's entanglement with nationalism appears as a transnational phenomenon. We will examine how the concept of socialist realism affects, thus grounds, contemporary Beijing Opera's performance style.
Book Reviews by I-Yi Hsieh
Taiwan Journal for Studies of Science, Technology and Society Vol. 34: 189-196 , 2022
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Papers by I-Yi Hsieh
本文探討2012年起，我針對北京「蟲魚花鳥市場」所進行的民族誌研究，描繪市場裡的收藏者與行家們，如何透過「與物之生（becomingwith）」的美學實踐，來面對城市周遭世界（umwelt）的急速變遷；透過緊抓住物所承載的歷史質感（qualia），讓身處當代北京的人們，即便人事全非，仍得以召喚隨著市場化而消逝的城市歷史感知。此間的「與物」，除了文玩物，還包含了動物和植物，這些與人們一起經歷當代中國市場經濟改革的「非人物種（non-human species）」，也成為了環境與時空意義的詮釋物（interpretant），「與物之生」則意味著透過空間感、觸覺，和聽覺這些感知行動，收藏者重新打造了一個相異於當代北京的時空感，而浸潤於「老北京」－清帝國晚期衰微世道下的懷舊風情－此一浪漫化了的象徵感知。當充滿了「與物實踐」的老北京懷舊市集，捲入了「國家計畫性市場化」，而轉變為超大型的收藏者市場時，這些遊走於物與人之間的核桃行家、蟲鳴師傅及金魚師傅，其「與物之生」，也捲進了商品經濟與物的威望（fame）象徵價值之間的擺盪。受到梅洛龐蒂現象學的「交織（chiasm）」思路所啟發，「與物之生」的民族誌希望能夠細膩地，同時批判性的探討中國市場化過程中，物的社會價值與人的象徵資本，兩者的交織與意義逆轉；以期回應市場化如何是一個不斷變化，危機四伏的歷程。
關鍵詞：北京，物，市場，都市變遷，周遭世界（umwelt
Against the backdrop of war, the translation further contextualizes Huang’s historical shift from anarchist politics to his focus on developing a unique theory of “culturology” since the outbreak of the Mukden Incident in 1931. This theory considers “culture” as central to constructing a new kind of cosmopolitanism, with which a commensurability can be achieved for all nations. Given the invaluable personal letters exchanged among the anarchists, annotated by Huang, this translated text provides insights into the “culture turn” among many Chinese anarchists in the wake of the Sino-Japanese Wars.
Keywords. culture, war, Chinese anarchism, cosmopolitanism
This paper addresses the social economy created by 2016 Shanghai Biennale that ran from November 12, 2016 to March 12 2017. With the selection of the Indian curator/artist group Raqs Media Collective as the chief curator, the 11th Shanghai Biennale was structured around the idea to launch “the possibilities of South-South dialogue within the current scenario of a highly interconnected world.” Such an agenda has defined the selection of art works and artists presented in the Biennale – as works of video art, socially engaged multi-media installations, and performing arts being the highlights of the three-month-long show. Many events were convened around the city – including the 51 Personae Project, a collaboration launched with the local group Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society.
Instead of centering its curatorial philosophy on object-oriented conventions, the 11th Shanghai Biennale put forward an interrogation on the form of international biennale by challenging the Euro-American orbit, questioning how international art fair, or events of the equivalency, can be re-thought as a mode of production that pertains to social and aesthetic spheres at large. How does the biennale’s endeavor to convene these various video and performing events outside of the Power Station Museum, the main site for the biennale, speak to the imagination of the form of international biennale today and in the future? How does such a gesture expand an art fair outside of its temporal and spatial constraints? And how do the Shanghai art world respond to such an experiment that inverts the relationship between art and life? Addressing these sets of questions, this paper looks into how, with such a revision of the biennale’s relation to the global production of aesthetic economy, the 2017 Shanghai Biennale reconfigured its economic role inside and outside of the event.
Conference Papers by I-Yi Hsieh
This paper addresses the social economy created by 2016 Shanghai Biennale that ran from November 12, 2016 to March 12 2017. With the selection of the Indian curator/artist group Raqs Media Collective as the chief curator, the 11th Shanghai Biennale was structured around the idea to launch “the possibilities of South-South dialogue within the current scenario of a highly interconnected world.” Such an agenda has defined the selection of art works and artists presented in the Biennale – as works of video art, socially engaged multi-media installations, and performing arts being the highlights of the three-month-long show. Many events were convened around the city – including the 51 Personae Project, a collaboration launched with the local group Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society.
The paper discusses the process in which the township-corporatism emerges in China's reform era, and how this new financial mechanism changes the system of landownership along with the privatization policy that has been implemented upon Chinese state-owned enterprises since the 1990s.
(Please contact me for a copy of this paper.)
(Please contact me for a copy of this paper.)
Teaching Documents by I-Yi Hsieh
Book Reviews by I-Yi Hsieh