The Many Names of Anonymity

Join Winnie Wong and Marci Kwon as they trace the long and global history of anonymous Chinese artists working in port cities like Canton, London, Madras, Hong Kong, and San Francisco. Along the way, they ponder the role of art historians, curators, and collectors in recovering artists' names in archives that left them unidentified. Why do the names of artists matter so much to our understanding of art, and how do we assess the work of artists who signed no names, shared their names, or left behind too many?

Wong and Kwon will discuss Winnie Wong's gorgeous new book, The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade. (Available for advance purchase with your ticket.) This richly illustrated volume explores naming practices among painters working in the 18th and early 19th centuries, during a period of intensive trade between China and the West. In this work, Wong wrestles with two countervailing urgencies in contemporary culture: the drive to recognize all individuals as artists so that they may be granted the rights and privileges of authorship; and the inadequacy of the modern figure of "the artist" to contain the ingenuity, imagination, and originality of anonymous workers.

Their discussion will expand into Kwon's current research on artists in San Francisco's Chinatown. Together, Winnie and Marci will connect painters in a long lineage of working across oceans, in ports of trade, for merchants and the people.

Winnie Wong is professor of Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade, on contemporary art and the world's largest production center for oil on canvas art products. Her essays have recently appeared in Artforum, and for exhibitions at the Museum für Modern Kunst Frankfurt, the Ontario Gallery of Art, the Yale Center for British Art, and Karma Books.

Marci Kwon is associate professor of Art History at Stanford University, where she also co-directs the Asian American Art Initiative. She is the author of Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism. She is currently writing a book on the history of artists in post-earthquake San Francisco Chinatown.

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