DOC Avant-Garde; Internationalism; and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Latin America Otherwise) by Andrea Giunta in Arts-Photography

Description

In 1739 Chinarsquo;s emperor authorized the publication of a medical text that included images of children with smallpox to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Those images made their way to Europe; where they were interpreted as indicative of the ill health and medical backwardness of the Chinese. In the mid-nineteenth century; the celebrated Cantonese painter Lam Qua collaborated with the American medical missionary Peter Parker in the creation of portraits of Chinese patients with disfiguring pathologies; rendered both before and after surgery. Europeans saw those portraits as evidence of Western medical prowess. Within China; the visual idiom that the paintings established influenced the development of medical photography. In The Afterlife of Images; Ari Larissa Heinrich investigates the creation and circulation of Western medical discourses that linked ideas about disease to Chinese identity beginning in the eighteenth century.Combining literary studies; the history of science; and visual culture studies; Heinrich analyzes the rhetoric and iconography through which medical missionaries transmitted to the West an image of China as ldquo;sickrdquo; or ldquo;diseased.rdquo; He also examines the absorption of that image back into China through missionary activity; through the earliest translations of Western medical texts into Chinese; and even through the literature of Chinese nationalism. Heinrich argues that over time ldquo;scientificrdquo; Western representations of the Chinese body and culture accumulated a host of secondary meanings; taking on an afterlife with lasting consequences for conceptions of Chinese identity in China and beyond its borders.