In the spring of
2015, Associate Professor of Art History Li-Lin Tseng took a sabbatical leave, during
which time she took a three-week research trip to Asia. There she visited major
film archives and libraries in Taiwan and China, including the Chinese Taipei
Film Archive, the China Film Archive, the Shanghai Municipal Archive, and the
Shanghai Library. This research will contribute to her book project, titled Shanghai Crossing: Early Chinese Filmmakers,
Film Stars, and Film Critics and Their Many Encounters with the West, 1896-1937,
which focuses on intellectual and technical changes and exchanges among early
Chinese and European and American film professionals.
As part of her trip, Professor Tseng was very
fortunate to have an opportunity to speak with other scholars in her field,
such as the film producer and scholar, Liao Gene-fon, from the Department of Motion Pictures at the National
Taiwan University of Arts. She was also able to arrange a visit with the
grandson of Zheng Zhengqiu, the father of Chinese cinema. Professor Tseng is
will soon publish an article examining Zheng’s cinematic art, so this visit
provided her with a unique opportunity to probe into the inside story of Zheng’s
work.
In
Beijing, Professor Tseng also visited a number of
historical sites and art communities, including the Forbidden City, the Ming
Tomb, the Great Wall, and the 798 Art Zone. She is currently in the process of developing
a study abroad proposal in order to take PSU students to visit these sites as
well as other art communities in the near future.
In March,
Professor Tseng was invited by the Confucius Institute at Savannah State
University to give a talk, titled “From Shanghai to Hollywood: The Chinese and
Chinese Cinema in America, 1896-1937, and After.” There she also I screened two
films, A Trip Through China (1916)
and Shadow Magic (2001). Later that month she attended the 2015 Annual
Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in Chicago, IL, where she
presented a paper, “‘Arrested
Civilization’: John Thomson and His Travel Photography, 1873-1874,” for the panel “Seeing Qing China Differently.”
Also during her sabbatical
leave, Professor Tseng worked on several papers and proposals for conferences,
including a paper titled “Electrifying Illustrated News: Zheng
Zhengqiu (鄭正秋) and the Transformation of Graphic Arts
into Dramatic Cinema, 1910-1935,” which will appear in the peer-reviewed international
journal, Twentieth-Century China
(Maney Publishing) in 2016. She also
presented her a paper titled “From Shanghai to Hollywood: Chinese Cinema in
Transition, 1896-1937” at both the Mid Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies
(MAR-AAS) Conference and the Midwest Conference of Asian Affairs (MCAA) this
year. Professor Tseng was able to take advantage of this opportunity for
sabbatical leave and produce a great deal of work. This work will both further
the conversation regarding this subject matter in her field, as well as inform
her teaching to students of art history.