Art History and Visual Culture
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Browsing Art History and Visual Culture by Author "Kal, Hong"
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Item Open Access From Japan to Canadian Museum Storage: Continuous History of Objects from the Japanese Ceramic Collection of William C. Van Horne (18431915)(2016-11-25) Takesue, Akiko; Kal, HongThis dissertation traces the social life of a group of Japanese ceramic objects collected by Sir William Cornelius Van Horne (18431915) in late nineteenth-century Montreal, and examines the ways in which the meaning of these objects has shifted through their spatial and temporal movements: from Japan to Canada, from commodities to a private collection and then to museum collection, and from the late nineteenth century to the present. These objects embody interpretational gaps, between their high reputation during the collectors lifetime and their ambiguous status in the museum storage today, as well as the misidentification of a genuine tea bowl made by a prominent Japanese potter of seventeenth century. While such interpretational gaps are often considered to result from a lack of proper knowledge on the part of the individuals who evaluated the objects, this dissertation takes a different approach, in which the meaning of objects is seen as a production of multiple interactions among people, institutions, and societies at given times and places. Tracing the trajectories of Van Hornes Japanese ceramics as a continuous history from origin to current destination, and investigating their meaning-construction in relation to the modernization project of Japan, to Van Hornes interactions with others and to the museum operations, clearly demonstrate that the interpretational gaps of objects emerge through an epistemological disjuncture between the imagined idea of fixed authenticity and the actual, contingent processes of the objects meaning-formation. Through the cross-referencing of the actual objects, archival material, scholarly publications, and my own professional experience at the museum, this dissertation reveals some of the covert and unconscious mechanisms at work in knowledge production. These mechanisms disclose that the meaning of objects is created in the gaps between major arguments surrounding the historiography of Japanese art, collecting and collection, and museology. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, this dissertation raises questions about post-colonialist discourses on the Western system of knowledge production of non-Western objects; the belief of collection as a mere space for the subjects identity-formation; and the discussion of cultural knowledge-production in museums solely through the politics of display.Item Open Access Queer Modernities and Diasporic Art of the Middle East(2020-08-11) Gayed, Andrew; Kal, HongThis thesis investigates Middle Eastern diasporic artists in North America who are creating political art about queer identity. This doctoral project explores colonial contact zones to discuss queer identity in relation to politically motivated art being produced by the Middle Eastern diaspora and provides nuance and contributes to the growing scholarship on Middle Eastern contemporary art and cultural studies. I consider whether social scientists, cultural theorists, and historians can reach a narrative of Western and non-Western Modernity that works beyond sexual oppression (Middle East) versus sexual acceptance (North America), and instead examines a negotiation of diasporic sexuality. Arguing instead that diasporic subjects create an alternative coming-out narrative and identity script to inscribed Western models, the aim is to see the ways in which local instances of homosociality cite pre-Modern sexuality scripts within contemporary Middle Eastern art and its diaspora, and reject Western queer identity narratives that become exclusionary in non-Western contexts. By incorporating different sociological strategies in the analysis of contemporary art, this research strives to make self-identification categories less dichotomous and more expansive. This doctoral thesis examines how the artworks of Arab artists in the diaspora illustrate diasporic queer identities that are different from the global-to-local homocolonialism of Western gay identity, and provides examples of how local networks of identity are transmitted through visual language and how alternative sexuality scripts are written within transnational contexts. Examining the artworks of diasporic contemporary artists Jamil Hellu, Ebrin Bagheri, and 2fik (Toufique), I explore the concept of multiple Modernisms and their relationship to displacement, trauma, and Arab sexualities/masculinities within a postcolonial and anti-imperialist framework. Jamil Hellu uses photography, video, performance, and mixed-media art installations to create contrasting metaphors about the politics of cultural identities and the fluidity of sexuality. Ebrin Bagheris ink and paper drawings evoke histories of pre-modern, same-sex desires in Iranian culture. 2Fik uses his own diasporic identity as a subject in his work to explore the dichotomies of his Canadian-Moroccan culture and his lived experience as a queer Arab.