Current Research and Recent Publications by Stephen Whiteman
International Journal of Digital Humanities, 2022
The study of premodern architecture and built environments, particularly those involving extensiv... more The study of premodern architecture and built environments, particularly those involving extensive designed landscapes, presents a variety of challenges for the architectural historian. The problems of fragmentary source pools and unconventional sources, incomplete architectural remains, and the reconstruction of historical stratigraphy take particularly acute form in researching historic Chinese landscapes. This essay explores challenges and opportunities encountered in addressing these issues through the use of global information systems, or GIS. It represents a methodological reflection on efforts to reconstruct the physical and experiential landscapes of the largest eighteenth-century Qing imperial park-palace, Bishu shanzhuang 避暑 山莊, or the Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat, at a particular moment in its history. Rooted in other strands of spatial thinking about humanistic subjects, the methods and outcomes described below seek to put the disparate sources of the architectural, landscape, pictorial and textual archives related to the site in dialogue with one another to visualize multiple, overlapping iterations of the Mountain Estate in both physical and conceptual forms.
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GeoHumanities ’21: Proceedings of 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, 2021
Scenes, or jing 景, are the basic building blocks in the mediation of cultural landscapes in China... more Scenes, or jing 景, are the basic building blocks in the mediation of cultural landscapes in China. While scholars have discussed the ideas of jing in writing, their work, though valuable, falls short in capturing the experience it aims to describe and analyse. 3D modelling methods have been widely used to research and present historical objects for decades, yet most models focus on the visualisation, simulation, and rendering of static objects and structures, often separated from their surrounding environment. 'X-Sheds' extends the capabilities of digital 3D models and GIS to provide an alternative to textual description and analysis in remediating experiences in historical landscapes and environments for scholarly and popular audiences.
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Art Bulletin, 2021
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Where Dragon Veins Meet (UWP, 2020) by Stephen Whiteman
University of Washington Press, 2020
In 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Re... more In 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde, Hebei) to support his annual tours north among the court's Inner Mongolian allies. The Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Bishu Shanzhuang) was strategically located at the node of mountain "veins" through which the Qing empire's geomantic energy was said to flow. At this site, from late spring through early autumn, the Kangxi emperor presided over rituals of intimacy and exchange that celebrated his rule: garden tours, banquets, entertainments, and gift giving.
Stephen Whiteman draws on resources and methods from art and architectural history, garden and landscape history, early modern global history, and historical geography to reconstruct the Mountain Estate as it evolved under Kangxi, illustrating the importance of landscape as a medium for ideological expression during the early Qing and in the early modern world more broadly. Examination of paintings, prints, historical maps, newly created maps informed by GIS-based research, and personal accounts reveals the significance of geographic space and its representation in the negotiation of Qing imperial ideology. The first monograph in any language to focus solely on the art and architecture of the Kangxi court, Where Dragon Veins Meet illuminates the court's production and deployment of landscape as a reflection of contemporary concerns and offers new insight into the sources and forms of Qing power through material expressions.
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This document compiles the original Chinese source texts translated in Stephen H. Whiteman, Where... more This document compiles the original Chinese source texts translated in Stephen H. Whiteman, Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020).
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Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe, 2020
Supplementary materials accompanying _Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate ... more Supplementary materials accompanying _Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe_ (Washington UP, 2020), including high-resolution maps, original Chinese texts, and additional images, are available here.
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Beijing: Zhongxin chuban jituan, 2021
Mainland (Simplified) Chinese translation of Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His ... more Mainland (Simplified) Chinese translation of Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe (UWP, 2020). Translated by Zhu Ziyi 朱子仪.
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T'oung Pao, 2023
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Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2022
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Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2022
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Architectural Histories, 2022
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The Art Bulletin, 2022
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East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine , 2021
A review of Stephen H. Whiteman's latest book, Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and Hi... more A review of Stephen H. Whiteman's latest book, Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe, by Bin Xu, Associate Professor, Palace Museum, Beijing.
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Journal of Chinese Studies, 2021
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2021
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Sehepunkte, 2021
http://www.sehepunkte.de/2021/03/34337.html
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The Global History Podcast, 2021
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New Books Network, 2020
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Books by Stephen Whiteman
This new volume, co-published by Power Publications and National Gallery Singapore, explores the ... more This new volume, co-published by Power Publications and National Gallery Singapore, explores the art and architecture of Southeast Asia in the postwar period. Ten essays by emerging scholars draw upon unexplored archives and works of art, bearing witness to rich local histories and uncovering complex artistic exchanges across Cambodia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and beyond.
The collection sheds new light on the significance of architecture, painting, installation, photography, and sculpture in the historical narratives of this period and offers fresh insights into artistic production and reception within the cultural and political contexts of postcolonialism and the Cold War, the legacies of which continue to shape the region today.
https://shop.powerpublications.com.au/products/ambitious-alignments-new-histories-of-southeast-asian-art-1945-1990
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Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 2018
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Current Research and Recent Publications by Stephen Whiteman
Where Dragon Veins Meet (UWP, 2020) by Stephen Whiteman
Stephen Whiteman draws on resources and methods from art and architectural history, garden and landscape history, early modern global history, and historical geography to reconstruct the Mountain Estate as it evolved under Kangxi, illustrating the importance of landscape as a medium for ideological expression during the early Qing and in the early modern world more broadly. Examination of paintings, prints, historical maps, newly created maps informed by GIS-based research, and personal accounts reveals the significance of geographic space and its representation in the negotiation of Qing imperial ideology. The first monograph in any language to focus solely on the art and architecture of the Kangxi court, Where Dragon Veins Meet illuminates the court's production and deployment of landscape as a reflection of contemporary concerns and offers new insight into the sources and forms of Qing power through material expressions.
Books by Stephen Whiteman
The collection sheds new light on the significance of architecture, painting, installation, photography, and sculpture in the historical narratives of this period and offers fresh insights into artistic production and reception within the cultural and political contexts of postcolonialism and the Cold War, the legacies of which continue to shape the region today.
https://shop.powerpublications.com.au/products/ambitious-alignments-new-histories-of-southeast-asian-art-1945-1990
Stephen Whiteman draws on resources and methods from art and architectural history, garden and landscape history, early modern global history, and historical geography to reconstruct the Mountain Estate as it evolved under Kangxi, illustrating the importance of landscape as a medium for ideological expression during the early Qing and in the early modern world more broadly. Examination of paintings, prints, historical maps, newly created maps informed by GIS-based research, and personal accounts reveals the significance of geographic space and its representation in the negotiation of Qing imperial ideology. The first monograph in any language to focus solely on the art and architecture of the Kangxi court, Where Dragon Veins Meet illuminates the court's production and deployment of landscape as a reflection of contemporary concerns and offers new insight into the sources and forms of Qing power through material expressions.
The collection sheds new light on the significance of architecture, painting, installation, photography, and sculpture in the historical narratives of this period and offers fresh insights into artistic production and reception within the cultural and political contexts of postcolonialism and the Cold War, the legacies of which continue to shape the region today.
https://shop.powerpublications.com.au/products/ambitious-alignments-new-histories-of-southeast-asian-art-1945-1990
About the contributors
Stephen H. Whiteman is Lecturer in Asian Art in the Department of Art History and Associate Curator for China Projects for the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney. A specialist in early modern painting and print culture and the history of gardens in China, he received his doctorate from Stanford University in 2011. He has been the recipient of research fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and is most recently the co-author of Thirty-Six Views: The Kangxi Emperor’s Mountain Estate in Poetry and Prints (Harvard, 2016). Current projects include a monograph on landscape in the Qing court, Constructing Kangxi: Landscape, Image, and Ideology in Early Qing China, and an edited volume, Rhetorics of Landscape: Articulating Authority across the Early Modern World, which explores early modern landscapes from a global, connected perspective.
Minerva Inwald is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. Her current research focuses on the National Art Museum of China in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, examining how exhibitions at this prestigious space were used to communicate ideas about the role of art in the People’s Republic of China. In 2015, she completed a postgraduate exchange semester at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.
Bingqing Wei is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the artistic and socio-political significance of the depiction of optical devices in Chinese visual culture from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. She holds a Master of Arts awarded by the University of Alberta (Canada, 2012) and a Master of Museum Studies bestowed by the University of Toronto (Canada, 2007). She has held positions as research assistant at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and The University of Alberta Museums in Edmonton. Her research has contributed to several major exhibitions, including China’s Imperial Modern: Painter’s Craft (University of Alberta Museums, 2012).
John Clark is Professor Emeritus in Art History at the University of Sydney, the author of five books and editor or co-editor of another five. His Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai art of the 1980s and 1990s (Power Publications, 2010), won the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand ’s Best Art Book prize in 2011. He is currently working on a two-volume study, The Asian Modern, 1850s–1990s, which includes detailed comparative studies of five generations of modern Asian artists between the 1850s and 1990s. His Contemporary Asian Art at Biennials will be published by National University of Singapore Press in mid- 2017. He co-curated Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art, 1910–1935 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1998, and in 2014 co-curated an exhibition of the work of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook in Sydney and Canberra.
Paperback, 100 colour images, 168pp
Floating Time: Chinese Prints, 1954–2002 is published by Power Publications, in association with University Art Gallery, The University of Sydney.
by the physical, technological and conceptual developments of their
era. Evolving forms of communication, greatly expanded mobility, the spread
of scientific knowledge and the emergence of an increasingly integrated global
economy all affected the means by which states articulated and projected
visions of authority. Landscape both reflected and served as a vehicle for
these transformations, as the relationship between space and its imagination,
construction and consumption became a fruitful site for the negotiation of
individual and corporate identities within and beyond the precincts of the
court.
behind the APT series and its role in collection-building at the Queensland Art Gallery; John Clark examines the state of specialist training in Asian art research in Australia and its institutional impact; and Charlotte Galloway describes the difficulties of positioning Asian art history via her experience at the Australian National University. Also featuring responses to the symposium from James Bennett and Susie Lingham; a panel discussion on curating Chinese art in an Australian context; and exhibition reviews of Ink Remix: Contemporary Art from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong and Eugenia Lim’s Yellow Peril.
The intersections of geography, landscape and ethnicity were central to the formation of the Qing state and its power. The Qing conquest elite and the empire they ruled were geographically and culturally distinct and mutually unfamiliar. The early state’s principal challenges lay in establishing the legitimacy of their rule while creating a geographically and culturally cohesive empire out of highly disparate parts. The invention of a new, fundamentally “Qing” landscape, one that reflected both the empire’s diversity and its ideal unity, was central to the success of all these goals. Through the construction of imperial garden-palaces, and court-produced representations of them in paintings, books and other media, the court created a politically and culturally significant landscape associated solely with the emperor.
Bishu shanzhuang was perhaps the most important of these imperial landscapes. Built beyond the Great Wall, it is located in a region, Rehe, or Jehol, that the court simultaneously described as non-Chinese and as wild, natural and undiscovered – a culturally blank canvas. There, the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1723) ordered the construction of an expansive garden-palace that miniaturized the diverse geography of the empire, while at times literally recreating the landscapes of the historic heart of Chinese culture, the South. In their seeming contradictions, together garden and site thus embodied the court’s complex negotiation of multiethnic identities, a central concern of the state throughout the dynasty. Treating the Mountain Villa as a second capital, the emperor and many of his successors hunted, engaged in diplomacy, and enjoyed the crisp, cool air of the mountains and valleys. Through these activities and imperially-produced representations of the gardens in paintings, albums, gazetteers and other media, the court created a politically and culturally significant landscape associated primarily with the emperor, used to assert legitimacy, demonstrate authority and create bonds of loyalty with those whose support was most crucial to the ongoing stability and power of the Qing dynasty.
The dissertation seeks to address a number of methodological concerns, as well. By focusing primarily on the Kangxi period, the project counters conventional treatments of the site that consider only its final state of development under the Qianlong emperor and reestablishes the Kangxi emperor as an independent political actor whose ideologically oriented cultural productions laid the foundation of Qing imperial practice for the remainder of the dynasty. Similarly, departing from earlier narratives that framed Bishu shanzhuang either as a recreation of a literati garden on a massive scale or as a reconstruction of the Buddhist universe intended for a non-Chinese audience, this project recognizes the centrality of both Chinese and non-Chinese vocabularies in the Rehe landscape. Finally, this study presents new approaches to understanding the importance of landscape as medium for ideological expression throughout the Qing and in the early modern world more broadly."""
Recasting the Question: Digital Approaches in Art History and Museums is a day-long symposium exploring the application of digitally-based methods to the study and presentation of art and architecture in universities and museums. Bringing together international experts in digital art history and exhibition with leaders in the field in Australia, Recasting the Question offers the opportunity to explore the critical and scholarly issues that animate this emerging discipline through a series of projects focused on art and architecture from Australia and around the world.
Speakers will use current research projects as jump off points for thinking through the ideas and issues that stand behind their projects and how those ideas have evolved from (or relate to) the field as it has conventionally been known and practiced.
Recasting the Question: Digital Approaches in Art History and Museums is a day-long symposium exploring the application of digitally-based methods to the study and presentation of art and architecture in universities and museums. Bringing together international experts in digital art history and exhibition with leaders in the field in Australia, Recasting the Question offers the opportunity to explore the critical and scholarly issues that animate this emerging discipline through a series of projects focused on art and architecture from Australia and around the world.
Speakers will use current research projects as jump off points for thinking through the ideas and issues that stand behind their projects and how those ideas have evolved from (or relate to) the field as it has conventionally been known and practiced.
“Asian Art Research in Australia and New Zealand: Past, Present, Future” brings together scholars and curators from across institutions, fields, and practices to explore the particular historical developments that have come to constitute the study of Asian art in Australia and New Zealand.
This day-long symposium presents new research by both emerging practitioners and senior members of the field, through which participants will investigate the historiography of Asian art in Australia and New Zealand, assessing our achievements and the current state of the field, so as to better consider future directions.
Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art is funded through the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, and developed by The Power Institute Foundation for Art & Visual Culture at the University of Sydney in cooperation with regional partners, National Gallery Singapore and The Institute of Technology, Bandung.
Our investigation will focus on the Thirty-six Views of Bishu Shangzhuang (c.1714) engraved by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ripa with the assistance of local artists, in response to the Kangxi Emperor’s request to have his new palace documented with Western-style prints. This volume is the first to document a Chinese royal palace and its gardens from multiple sites and perspectives with a combination of text and image, and the striking similarity between this album and the views of French palaces gifted to Kangxi strongly suggests iconographic and conceptual borrowings from the French precedent. This paper will facilitate a more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural artistic exchange developing out of diplomatic gifts between Louis XIV and the Kangxi Emperor.
Focusing particularly on Bishu shanzhuang, this paper seeks to recover the distinctive nature of the Kangxi emperor’s landscape, which reflected a ruler confronting wholly different political and cultural challenges than those faced by his grandson, the Qianlong emperor. Through early pictorial and textual accounts of the site, archival records and other sources, the paper traces the distinct phases of architectural development at Rehe under the Kangxi emperor by attending to questions of the presentation and representation of landscape that have been obscured by later history and historiography. Finally, the paper examines several areas of significant transformation under the Qianlong emperor, including subtle shifts in rhetoric and naming and substantial new construction that represented not a completion of the Kangxi emperor’s original vision for Rehe, but a fundamental and profound reënvisioning of the site’s conceptual narrative.
A broader exploration of Wang Yuanqi’s oeuvre reveals a more complicated picture, however, one in which Wang’s production in and out of the court overlapped not only chronologically, but also stylistically and thematically. This paper explores works from the last fifteen years of Wang Yuanqi’s life, works at once emblematic of his larger production – albums of views after ancient masters and ostensibly generic hanging landscapes, for instance – and representative of a mature, more ambitious mode that bridged historical models and orthodox manners, contributing fundamentally to the innovative use of landscape as a meaningful genre within the Qing court. "
In his groundbreaking study of Bishu shanzhuang, Mapping Chengde, Philippe Fôret argued that, “the geography of the Qing empire during the 18th century was intimately intertwined with Tibetan Buddhism… and that the degree of this intimacy becomes surprisingly apparent in an examination of the iconography of the summer residence [Bishu shanzhuang].” In Fôret’s description, the landscape was marked as Buddhist architecturally through the so-called Eight Outer Temples, magnificent Tibetan-style structures that ringed the garden-palace, and in its overall mandalic design, which recreated the Buddhist cosmos of nine mountains and eight seas centered upon Mt. Sumeru.
This paper questions Fôret’s interpretation of religion in the landscape of Bishu shanzhuang by introducing new sources and audiences and emphasizing the transformation of the landscape over the course of the 18th century. In an effort to limit the scope of discussion, I will focus on Bishu shanzhuang under the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722), for whom, I argue, the site was not explicitly or primarily Buddhist, but rather reflected a range of philosophical and religious influences in approaching diverse audiences. Reading Bishu shanzhuang as consisting of multiple landscapes that operate largely in concert, the paper explores the physical landscape and architecture of the garden-palace, depictions of the garden in image and verse, and first-hand accounts by visitors to the garden.
Through these discussions, I hope to address not only the subject of Qing imperial landscapes, but the very question posed by the symposium: what is religion in the garden and how may it be defined? When we talk about religion in the garden, what questions are we seeking to answer, what insight are we hoping to gain? Is religion in the garden a philosophical construct, as in readings of gardens as Daoist microcosms? Or is it reflected through landscape and architecture, beliefs made physically manifest? As a site shaped by both rhetoric and behavior, how does either mode of construction help clarify the issue of Bishu shanzhuang as a religious landscape? I do not hope to offer a neat answer to these questions, but rather to pose them as a means towards a more flexible understanding of religion in gardens and landscapes.
This panel investigates images and objects as a means for inscribing and mobilizing ideas across societies and cultures during the long eighteenth century.
Whether visual, textual or architectural, the arts serve as a medium through which ideas may be constructed and conveyed. Thanks to dramatic developments in scientific knowledge, technologies of production, economic systems, and global movement and communication, the ways in which people interacted with, imagined and recorded themselves and others expanded and evolved markedly during the long eighteenth century. Visual and material culture was central to this process, as modes of engagement with the physical and represented world evolved as well. Prints, books, textiles and decorative objects, in turn, figured prominently in the movement of information and ideas within and across cultures, as visual or written material often served as metonymic substitutes or performative contexts for a foreign other.
Whether visual, textual or architectural, the arts serve as a medium through which ideas may be constructed and conveyed. Thanks to dramatic developments in scientific knowledge, technologies of production, economic systems, and global movement and communication, the ways in which people interacted with, imagined and recorded themselves and others expanded and evolved markedly during the long eighteenth century. The arts were central to this process, as modes of engagement with the physical and represented world evolved as well. Prints, books, textiles and decorative objects, in turn, figured prominently in the movement of information and ideas within and across cultures, as visual or written material often served as metonymic substitutes or performative contexts for a foreign other.
This panel invites papers that explore the movement of ideas within and across societies and cultures as expressed through visual and material culture, broadly conceived. Possible themes include (but are by no means limited to):
- Sociability and/or politics of material culture or the built environment
- Dissemination of ideas across social strata/changing of viewing publics through printing
- Intersections of scientific techniques and artistic method, such as the visualization of the landscape through cartography/chorography
- Changing physical, conceptual or intellectual interactions with the arts, architecture or landscape.
- Transcultural aesthetics, such as in palace/garden design or representation
- The role of objects and images in diplomatic exchange
Conveners: Robert Wellington (ANU), Stephen Whiteman (University of Sydney)
Deadline for abstracts: Friday 13 June 2014.
We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers. Proposals consist of a 250-word abstract and a 2-page cv.
Please send proposals or other inquiries to: Robert Wellington: robert.wellington@anu.edu.au, and Stephen Whiteman: swhiteman@alumni.stanford.edu
This panel seeks to illuminate how early modern states shaped and were shaped by the landscape, including both physical sites, such as gardens, courts and hunting parks, and rhetorical ones, whether depicted through image, text or other media. How did early modern states engage the landscape as a medium for the formation and expression of imperial identity or power? What effects did transformations in the early modern period, such as the rapid expansion of printing, increasing intra- and interregional travel and commercializing economies, have on these processes? What may be learned about both landscape and the early modern world through a comparative study of these and related questions?
We invite papers presenting new research critically engaging the nature of landscape and state power in Europe or Asia during the early modern period. Particularly welcome are studies that expand understandings of landscape as a medium of cultural expression.
Please send paper proposals to: swhiteman@alumni.stanford.edu