Panel Organizers: Michelle Wang (Reed) and Ellen Huang (University of California)

From porcelain in the global early modern to textiles of the medieval period, East Asian designs have inspired many scholarly interpretations. Early scholarship by art historians from the mid- twentieth century has typically applied an iconographical method of analysis to such wares to argue for their cultural significance. In more recent years, the interdisciplinary model of material culture studies has shifted the scope of inquiry from artefacts’ probable meanings to focus on objects’ functions and use, including the exploration of their status as commodities and taste- purveyors. From ritual productions to mass consumption, such analytical modes insightfully approach the surfaces of artefacts, providing new ways of thinking about forms as evidence of cross-cultural exchange and the possibility of a global art history. Attention, albeit to a lesser degree, has also been paid to what might be considered the depth of objects—how an object is made and its manufacture—but such scholarship generally distinguishes itself from studies on the history of an object’s use, function, and circulation.

This panel seeks to reintegrate surface with depth by discussing art historical works through the lens of design, wherein boundaries between designers, processes of making, and material lives of designed objects are blurred. To this end, this panel explores surface and depth as mutually constitutive and generative operations across a wide range of media, geography, and historical periods, including works of fine art, as in painting or sculpture, as well as objects traditionally classified as decorative arts, particularly, the portable, unbounded objects of global exchange such as textiles, furniture, and metalwork. By asserting the importance of production as part of the history of artefacts, the papers to be presented will highlight design qua process in the study of art history. In so doing, objects whose manufacture do not appear in historical documentation or whose finished surfaces remain only imaginary, may be alternatively resituated within a larger historical framework of design.

We welcome any paper that considers the inextricable relationship between depths of design— planning, organizing, and making—and surfaces of designed objects in East Asia—replication, circulation, translation, and use—from any historical period. Papers that interrogate the porous boundaries between art history and design history are of particular interest, in addition to scholarship that questions or challenges the general marginalization of East Asian things in design studies.

Please email paper abstract (300 words) as submission to Ellen Huang (ellen.huang at aya.yale.edu)  and Michelle Wang (wangm at reed.edu) by April 11, 2016. 

CAA submission panel guidelines changed this year as of March 2016; hence the rather late notice.