Entangled Images: Early 20th-Century Chinese Popular Culture and Western Collections.

The workshop “Entangled Images” brings together early-career researchers working on Chinese popular visual and material culture from the late Qing Dynasty to the early People’s Republic. Taking the collection of Chinese popular prints at the Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK) as its point of departure, the workshop explores how images, objects, stories, and categories circulated across media, institutions, and transcultural contexts. Contributions address theatre and cartoons, calendar posters, ploughing-and-weaving iconography, lianhuanhua, pith paper, race and visual knowledge, exhibitions of “Old Shanghai,” and the collecting of Chinese material culture in Europe.

The workshop is organized within the framework of the DFG project “Early 20th-century Chinese Popular Prints: The Collection of the Museum am Rothenbaum, Hamburg.” (DFG Project No. 517637735)
Organizer: Dr. Bernd Spyra (Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg)

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PROGRAMME

THURSDAY, 11 June 2026
10:30–11:00 Welcome and Introduction

Bernd SPYRA (Freiburg University) – Entangled Images: The MARKK Collection and the Problem of Chinese Popular Visual Culture

11:00–12:30 Panel 1 – Media Entanglements

Stefan CHRIST (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) – Same Same But Different: Theatre New Year Pictures (Xichu Nianhua) and Modern Visuality in 1920s Shanghai

Amelia Kin-Wai CHU (Ghent University) – Between Morality and Modernity: Zheng Leiquan’s “Renjian” (1920) and Cartoons as a Tool for Negotiating Modernization and Preservation of Tradition in Colonial Hong Kong

Emma LAUBE (University of California) – The Mechanization of Enchantment: Metaphysical Worldviews in Calendar Posters

13:30–14:30 Panel 2 – Narrative Entanglements

TENG Yuning (FU Berlin) – The Transmission, Transformation, and Modernization of Ploughing and Weaving Iconography

SONG Jiu (Heidelberg University) – The Reader Inside the Panels: Shaping and Mobilising Readers in 1950s Lianhuanhua (1954–1956)

15:30–17:00 Exhibition Visit – “Druckfrisch aus den Zwanzigern”, Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK)

18:00–19:00 Keynote Lecture

Prof. Dr. Juliane NOTH (FU Berlin) – Cai Yuanpei and the Modernization of Chinese Art

FRIDAY, 12 June 2026
10:30–11:30 Panel 3 – Knowledge Entanglements

Dahi JUNG (University of Zurich) – From Botanical Specimen to Export Art: The Shifting Classification of Chinese Pith Paper in Western Collections

Kevin BOCKHOLT (Ruhr University Bochum) – Photographic Representations of the First World War in China, 1914–1918

12:00–13:30 Panel 4 – Institutional Entanglements

HUANG Weicheng (FU Berlin) – Race as Visual Practices between Hamburg and Nanjing

Christina CAO (University of Oxford) – Exhibiting a Belle Époque – Old Shanghai in the 21st Century

Emily TEO (KU Leuven) – From Chinoiserie to Ethnography: Collecting and Classifying Chinese Material Culture in Europe (1700-1900)

14:30–15:30 Roundtable Discussion
Rethinking Chinese Popular Visual Culture through Entangled Images