In this public talk, Winnie Wong presents and discusses her most recent book, The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade. She explores two countervailing urgencies in contemporary cultural politics: the drive to recognize all individuals as artists so that they may be granted the rights and privileges of authorship; and, at the same time, the inadequacy of the modern figure of “the artist” to contain the ingenuity, imagination, and originality of anonymous workers. It does so by focusing on a long marginalized but ubiquitous genre of painting: portraits produced by Chinese artisans in the port of Guangzhou for European merchants at the height of the Qing dynasty. In this relationship, makers are anonymized, while merchants’ lives are preserved in vivid detail, but portraiture occasions the empirical scene of their encounter. This book charts a framework for understanding visual production and trade across overlapping imperial spaces, and demonstrates how contemporary art historical inquiry can yet decouple authorial names from authorial works, a step necessary to looking anew at anonymity, multiplicity, and the ingenuity of nameless artisans.

Winnie Wong is a professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an art historian with a special interest in fakes, forgeries and counterfeits.

ADMISSION
– Open seating/admission (no ticket or registration required)
– FREE and open to the public.
– Located at Porter College D245

PARKING
– Lot 124 & 125 are the closest parking lots to the event