 Hello and welcome everyone. My name is Stacy Pearson and I am the program convener for the MA History of Art and Archeology and I've been at SOAS for many years. I actually was here as a student so long ago. I'm too embarrassed to tell you, but that just tells you how great SOAS is, particularly I think in my field which is History of Art and Archeology. My specialism is Chinese ceramics and Chinese art, but I also work on the history of collecting and the art market. And these are two topics I combined in my taster lecture for today because these are also two topics we cover in several of our MA program. So I'm just going to share my screen and we will start with a lecture that includes some interesting objects, but also some interesting history about objects in China. And when I was thinking about the best way to introduce this topic I thought I might look at an object that I teach and in my field will be very familiar but one that also broke records in the Chinese art market. And that's the cup that you can see there on the right that's being held by the two gentlemen on the left. The man in the short sleeve shirt is the buyer Liu Yichen and the man in the suit is a former student of SOAS, former student of mine in fact Nicholas Chao. Now this came up for sale in 2014 and sold for the record breaking price of about 36 million US dollars and you can see how small that cup is. So why would a a cup like that be worth so much money and why would somebody like Mr. Liu want to pay that much? Well I think we need to first look at it as an iconic art object. So it actually is known in both English and in Chinese as a chicken cup for obvious reasons and it was made in the period during the reign of the Chenghua emperor during the Ming dynasty and porcelain made in this period is considered some of the finest produced in Chinese history but particularly in the Ming dynasty. So it is of course beautifully made, beautifully painted but it's not unique however it was much appreciated by the emperor who also was quite fond of that particular motif the chicken with little chicks right because if you look at the painting on the right you can see that this is a painting the Chenghua emperor owned. He collected it and it features a chicken with her chicks so it also reminds us that this was very much in that emperor's taste and so there's a close connection to the emperor which adds to the value of this particular cup but what I want to focus on is how it came to be a collected object and then something that entered the market for Chinese art. So what do we know about Chinese art collecting in the time period in which this particular cup was made during the 15th century and later? Well we know who the collectors were we know a lot about some of the collection and of course collecting practices so that's what I want to summarize now and hopefully get to the end and understand why someone would pay 36 million dollars for a Ming wine cup. If we look at collecting art in China we have to first start with what was the top of the collecting hierarchy. So in China that's painting and calligraphy so in fact it wouldn't be a porcelain wine cup but if some if one were to be a respected and prominent collector one would choose painting and calligraphy. There were lots of patrons for the production of painting and calligraphy. The collectors included government officials, merchants, other artists and the court and also if you move into the later Ming dynasty this expanded to include you know court units of people working for the court and people became really competitive in the painting and calligraphy collecting and art market. One collector that we know a little bit about owned the painting that you see here. The painting is earlier than Ming it's dated 1306 and it was collected by a scholar official called Zhu Yunming. So scholar officials were one category of collector. Another category were what are generally known as the literati elite most of these were painters and calligraphers who were also themselves collectors. One example is the painter of this painting that you see here Shen Zhou who painted this in 1467 as a birthday gift for his teacher and that was of course one way that artworks would circulate. The painting however is in the style of an earlier painter called Wang Meng and this painter Shen Zhou owned painting by Wang Meng so he's drawing on his own collected objects to produce new works of art like this one. Shen Zhou also had a really interesting way of storing his collected objects. He took his paintings and pieces of calligraphy and actually mounted them pasted them into a long horizontal scroll and he called it the collection scroll. So you know instead of putting them on the wall he put them into a scroll which was a format for painting and one of the paintings included in that scroll which unfortunately is now lost but we know because people wrote about it. With painted by this painter who you see here a small painting by the painter Dai Jin. Shen Zhou's scroll method wasn't unique however because in 1982 the tomb of a very successful merchant called Long Zhen was discovered and in his tomb they found two long scrolls that have been mounted with 24 paintings and one piece of calligraphy. So the fact that he's a merchant is interesting because clearly he was using art collecting to elevate his social status but it wasn't unusual that the collection was buried with him. That was something that had been practiced much earlier generally however at very high levels of society including in imperial tomb. So what could he do with the collection when it's buried? Well effectively he possibly thought that this would enable him to continue his enjoyment and the social use of his collection in the afterlife. One of the pieces that was found in his tomb is the painting you see there which is a wonderful sort of calligraphic painting by Zhang Mo Cheng called Pickled Orchids. Now another collection that we know quite a lot about but for a different reason was the collection of the government official the grand secretary Yan Song who died in 1565 and we know a lot about it because he was really corrupt and his collection was seized but his collection was famous in his lifetime because it was huge and he had built it up along with his son. Now one of the pieces he collected is the painting you see here that's a small part of a huge painting that's one of the most famous paintings in Chinese history the Qingming scroll as it's known but like the rest of his collection after it was seized by the government it was sold at a public auction which could be sad but it also meant that this material came onto the market so other people could add it to their collection and one of the things that he owned was this really really famous piece of calligraphy that was created by a monk in a style that he called crazy drafting script and it's dated 777 so quite early but that was in Yan Song's collection when it was sold off at public auction it was later purchased by this collector who was famous in a different way Xiang Yan Bian belonged to a really prominent very wealthy family in the Ming dynasty he was a very skillful painter himself but even more successful as a businessman and his business was actually as an art dealer so he developed a really profitable art dealing business buying and selling art and at the same time this made him the foremost art collector of his day he as was common practice gave his art collection a name in this case it was Tian Lang Ge the hall of heavenly sound and he also owned not just this piece of calligraphy but also paintings like this which is an iconic painting by the Song painter Gong Kai which is today in Japan he also owned this painting which is a smaller painting also from the same time period the Song period in the style of what's known as the blue and green landscape now we know that Xiang Yan Bian before he died divided his collection amongst his six children but unfortunately he died just before the end of the Ming dynasty and so after his death his family's art collection was seized by invading Qing troops and the Qing would be the last dynasty after the Ming and after they seized the collection they scattered it now again this was sad on the one hand but it brought artworks like this onto the market and pieces from Xiang's collection through this mechanism even ended up in the imperial collection now one thing you can see in this painting here is there's a lot of writing on it and sort of big red seals but that's a form of collecting practice that is really quite distinctive in china and it literally is writing on works of art that you own and the kind of writing is generally poetic it often says who owned it um sometimes it will be calligraphy as you see here on the left sometimes even an additional painting is added to it that was painted by a chinese emperor who owned it and then you can see these red seals which also belong to owners of the painting now this is two small views of again a very long very important painting in chinese history that's today in the buddhist museum and known as the admonition scroll but it too was owned by xiang umbn so you see that writing on art is a collecting practice during the Ming and Qing period but so is writing about art and it was in the Ming dynasty that writing about art kind of really exploded because there was that the same time a huge expansion of print culture and so printed and illustrated books were made in much greater numbers and distributed therefore in greater numbers than ever before one of my colleagues professor craig clunas said about this at this time more people more kinds of people saw more pictures and more kinds of pictures than at any previous stage in china's long history the example i'm showing you here was a book that was published in 1603 which is the first pictorial history of painting in china and in it were reproduced famous works of art or what the author considered to be important works of art and effectively it became kind of a style manual for artists but also a catalog for collectors and it was created by a court artist called gubing now another collecting practice that involved um particularly painting calligraphy with something known as um literary gathering where scholar officials and elite painters would get together to view works of art compose poetry and share calligraphy and this is a form of social viewing in this image you can see four or no three i'm going blind you can see three scholar officials who are examining works of art the two at the front you can see are holding a hanging scroll painting that looks like if you look closely it just has a hint of bamboo at the bottom and this reminds us if we think about bamboo painting that it wasn't just men who participated in this it's very likely that women also participated in social viewing experiences of works of art here's a painting showing just that it's two women looking at painting and it's today in the art museum of princeton university but in it you can see these two women who are probably court women looking at a bamboo painting not too similar to the one we've just seen and they might be looking at a painting by a famous bamboo painter guandao but it wasn't just painting and calligraphy that were viewed in settings like this antiquities is object from distant past like ancient bronzes and jades for example were also subjected to kind of viewing practices that were somewhat less social but certainly took place in similar settings like beautiful gardens such as the one that you can see here and this is part of a painting called enjoying antiquities which is just what this official is doing you can see his servant is presenting antiquities to him that are laid out on a table for viewing and antiquities is another category of collecting that was very popular amongst these collectors in china during the Ming and the Qing dynasty and antiquities were also important in another way because they were collected for scholarly purposes in addition to collecting them sort of as works of art because they were seen as representations of china's path so they were collected in order to study and understand that path and it became very much a kind of collecting an intellectual collecting activity so writing about these collections was an important part of that and then the written catalog then became a vehicle for the study a good example is the book i've reproduced here which is written in the song period it's called the caogu too it's a book of antiquities and it was written in 1092 by someone who himself was a famous collector and it featured images drawings of important antiquities like the one you see there now in the Ming dynasty they also wrote about old objects that they treated in a slightly different way they thought of them more as antiques rather than antiquities so they're effectively they're not quite as old but they're just old enough that they are then collectible because for things like porcelain porcelain is something you could use in everyday life so it's not really collectible but once it becomes old enough then it's transformed into an antique and so age was a really important criterion of collectability for things like porcelain or lacquer an item like that so that brings us to the end of the Ming dynasty but much of this activity continued in the Qing and were certain new approaches also being added to the practices one interesting thing that happens in the Qing dynasty which is the last imperial dynasty in china with that you see a close connection between private collecting and court collecting and that often happens through both activities of the private collections as well as the court so I'm taking you back to this famous piece of calligraphy that we looked at earlier that was owned by several collectors because once that came on the market after the end of the Ming dynasty it was acquired by another collector that we know something about whose name is Anchi or was and Anchi was a merchant of Korean origin who also had members of this family who worked for the Qing court but he was considered the greatest collector of his time he owned very famous works of calligraphy such as Huai Xu's crazy drafting script and he also own works by famous painters such as Wen Zhenming there's a nice portrait of Anchi that you see there on the bottom left that's in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston but his collection too much of it was presented to the imperial court probably not by choice probably he was encouraged or his heirs were encouraged to donate objects to the court so that was one way that the court acquired collection and it was acquired by the court of the Chen Long Emperor who reigned from 1736 to 1795 and of all the imperial collectors the Chen Long Emperor is probably the most famous his collection was arguably the largest but he was also actively engaged in the building up the documentation and the management of the imperial collection under his reign all objects and works of art were treated equally in terms of management so he really implemented collections management policies which is what we would call it today in museums and yet he also adopted the earlier Chinese conventions and standards for collecting including the hierarchy so painting and calligraphy were still at the top in the imperial collection he further continued the practice of writing on works of art not just painting but almost anything you can think of as well as the boxes that contain them so a good example of how much writing he did on works of art is what you can see in the calligraphy piece on the right and he collected foreign objects but unlike Chinese objects they weren't seen as ways of understanding themselves Chinese culture but more an illustration of power and control over foreign lands foreign people and foreign goods now the Chen Long emperors collecting practices extended to the production of multiple catalogs of vast categories of objects in the imperial collecting in the imperial collection so all these collecting and cataloging projects were sort of interlinked because there was this imperial policy of collecting and also shaping the past through collecting and these catalogs were huge undertaking because they involved a lot of research organization and ranking of objects so they created their own hierarchy of objects within the imperial collection so there were number one ranks number two and going down they also recorded all the objects often with illustrations but always with extensive text and this created a huge body of knowledge about not just the imperial collection but all of these objects and it has proved to be quite useful these catalogs um in today's market if for Chinese art um here's a bronze formally from the imperial collection which was featured in this catalog which was one of the imperial catalogs known as um the Xi Jinping and this was printed in 1755 which was one year in which several catalogs were printed and it included this bronze as well as many of the top rank bronzes and in the imperial collection so when this came up for sale I think at Christie's in New York um in 2018 of course they referred back to the image of it and its documentation in the Qing imperial catalog so I'm assuming that helped to sell the object now you might ask how that imperial bronze came on to the market so that it could be up for sale in 2018 well it's possibly one of those the many objects that from the imperial collection that were dispersed from the 1860s when foreign military activity led to the sacking and destruction of a number of imperial palaces including for example the Yuan Mingyuan or the Summer Palace and if we're thinking about paintings and calligraphy at least 200 at that time and from that palace were either destroyed or sold off but porcelains lacquers any type of object you can think of that was in the imperial palace was then stolen effectively as plunder and then put on the market which you know on the one hand was devastating but on the other it really kind of ushered in a new era of global collecting of Chinese art and this continued throughout the second half of the 19th century and even went into the early 20th century when for example the famous Buddhist library at Dunhuang in central China was discovered full of paintings and illustrated books and textiles and you know many of those came on to the market as well and you can see them in collections of Chinese art all over the world but if you move into the 20th century of course the big event is the end of imperial China which happened in 1911 after the end of imperial rule art and antiquities flooded the market and of course this coincided with the emergence of archaeology which brought new material onto the market because it was hard to control the movement of objects from and their removal from archaeological site. China was also opening up its imperial collections to the world with the opening of the first national museum the palace museum in 1925 and throughout all this there were lots of foreign art dealers and antique dealers based in China over time because of course this was a very difficult time for China I mean much of the 20th century was Chinese dealers and collectors were also leaving China and often taking their collections with them one place they went among many was Hong Kong so that brought in a new era of Chinese art collecting in Hong Kong for example but from the second half from the middle of the 20th century of course you have the communist revolution and the cultural revolution and this officially put a halt to not just the art market but collecting of art which was made illegal but it was so it wasn't really until the 1980s that you see the kind of resurgence of an art market in China but eventually by the 90s it really takes off and you see auctions being established in China and auction houses and many many galleries and that just the secondary market there were also galleries for painters and artists who were producing their work in greater numbers and as we know today are collected all over the world and what you see then now in the 21st century is what is often kind of praised as the rise of Chinese collectors including our friend Liu Yichen who's pictured here with his wife Wang Wei who's the director of their museum that they established in two sites in Shanghai which is called the Long Museum and he bought the chicken cup in 2014 and he's still buying and still putting art into his museum including the red lacquer throne you can see at the top which I think he paid six million pounds for in 2019 and then the jade piece Eastern Zhou Jade which I think was two and a half million pounds so he's still buying really at the top of the market in Chinese art but I think his example shows us that this isn't a new phenomenon people like to position it that way but as my brief history I hope showed the art market in China has a long history as does the collecting and collecting practices and activities around it so I would say that we're just seeing the continuation of a long tradition rather than a brand new phenomenon okay I'm going to finish there and I am willing to take any questions you might have about the lecture topic or about the MA programs in the history of art department and you can put your questions or even comments in the chat box okay yeah if you have any questions you can you can just type them oh yeah I can see the question Stacy so you will see it as well okay yeah so now I can see Chess I'm going into the Q&A but we have a question about what is the layout of the course so the structure of the course we have first of all we have let's see four MA programs we have the general one which is history of art and archaeology and then there's one for East Asia there's one for near Middle East and one called a new one called curating cultures they all have essentially the same structure which is if you take it say full time over one year you take a total of 180 credits and what that consists of is effectively eight modules plus a dissertation and the dissertation is worth one third of the overall mark for the degree so the dissertation is a really important element of it it's also one part of what's required if you want to take one of the specialist MA programs so let's say you wanted to take East Asia you would need to do your dissertation on an East Asia topic and take three at least three modules that's worked out to 45 credits that are dedicated East Asia history of art topics and then once you get beyond the required courses you have a lot of open options in our department so you can take any type of art history module that we're offering plus you can take a certain number of modules in other departments in fact that might complement your studies such as language history anthropology and that sort of thing so that structure is essentially the same for each of the programs the only one that isn't specialist is the one that I'm convener for so let's say you didn't want to specialize in one region you could take the general MA and take a mixture of any type of module so you could combine Middle East with China with Southeast Asia and say Japan any other questions about the program okay so when will the list of modules be finalized for 2021 entry that's a good question we're just now putting all that together so Maggie you might know exactly when but I think I think it's by April right normally yes but given that we are not entirely sure whether we'll be able to conduct you know on campus classes or fully on campus classes so I think there might be a slight delay but again students will be emailed those offer holders will be will be emailed so you will know exactly when to start choosing your modules and what options you will have yeah the if you want to look on our department website that's a pretty good indication of what's being offered but it will be finalized um relatively soon so as Maggie said as soon as it's finalized offer holders will be emailed about it any more questions or comments um I should point out that our student ambassador in by actually has done the MA answer us in our program so if you want to hear the student opinion um feel I'm sure she would be happy to give you her impressions of it so a question is is there anything I can do to prepare for the course any reading list um yeah there are general reading lists posted for each program and each course on our department webpage bearing in mind that right now it's representing the current academic year um but once the module list is finalized um you'll be able to go into our department web pages to see the general recommended reading for each module you can also um again probably if you want to do it over the summer you can also email module conveners um because we're happy to send you a short reading list if you wanted to do some reading over the summer I think I did that for you in by didn't I I have a vague memory of so it is something that we're happy to do so don't hesitate to ask I got from previous years people so yes that's right yeah and another question is um will be will there be any on campus lectures in the coming year I think that is yet to be decided I mean obviously you know I hope so but as Maggie pointed out um we're still waiting for effectively government advice on that because we can't act independently so I don't know if you want to say more about that Maggie yeah I think we we hope you know that we'll be able to reopen fully in September but again everything depends on the on the situation in in the UK and government guidance as well but again as you know um the situation has improved significantly I'm not sure where you are calling in from at the moment but again 24 25 million people have been inoculated have been vaccinated in the UK which which is good we're just waiting for our 10 we're waiting for our 10 and also I think the lockdown restrictions final restrictions will be lifted um in June by June so it I think it's it's quite you know the likelihood of opening on campus is is high but again we will not give you 100 you know guarantee that yes we'll definitely deliver all classes um on campus in the worst case scenario we might implement a blended approach so basically tutorials seminars on campus and big lectures obviously delivered remotely but again I think you will get a better picture and also we will publish an official announcement in the next few months once we get a better picture you know of the situation basically and and government guidance yeah we're really looking forward to things opening up a bit more here um so another question is approximately how many students are enrolled in MA history of art and archaeology so that particular program as I said is one of four so um this year in that particular program there were I think there's 43 um and in the the two most popular ones were that that one and East Asia and I think for East Asia there were 35 I know that most years we usually have a total across the MA programs of at least 100 um but we also you know it's a fairly large we have a relatively large department that we offer plenty of modules so I don't know if you're concerned about there being too many students but actually um we offer so many modules that it's often um hard to choose you know and I think there's there's so many interesting ones too so um try not to worry about the student numbers uh let's see uh let's so another student is saying um thanks for the lecture I'm wondering if you hold office hours and what do you think is the best way to communicate with with them with and learn from scholars teaching the MA course oh that's an interesting question well we all hold office hours including me um and we all hold them at least once a week um but some people like to divide them up over several days um and the best way to communicate with scholars teaching the MA course is the best is the way that you prefer so if you like to communicate by email that's fine if you prefer to you know now talk on video that's fine too um we're easy to get in touch with and um we're happy to communicate in any way so um once teaching starts of course you'll see us ideally hopefully fingers crossed in person and so there are even more ways to get in touch but for the moment um just choose whichever works for you another question is uh what time in the day do lectures and seminars tend to be hoping to do the course part time over two years yes part time over two years is an option and we have quite a few students who work who choose to do that option so um for those of you who need to work while you're doing it and want to do it part time over two years ideally you should also check the timetable when you're choosing modules check the timetable to see when they're scheduled to run so you can see if it works with your work schedule but normally um there are depends on the module um they're scheduled for you know Monday through Friday we don't start teaching until nine thank god um and generally teaching finishes by five but I know some colleagues teach modules in the five to seven p.m. uk time slot so some run then but it really varies um so I think in your case it's probably best to look at the module choices and the timetable to then choose them but you do it part time you can also spread it out over two years so that helps a lot yeah just just to touch upon this topic in terms of part time study now we cannot really accept student home students or students who are based settled in the uk so if you're an international student who requires a student visa to study we will not be able to offer you um a part time study option so it's for for home for home students or settled students here in in the uk okay thank you yeah I wasn't aware of that we've just changed it oh it just changed like two weeks ago okay so another question is um you know if if available online where might one find examples of student work and research project research projects I mean it depends on the department but you can look at current research student work um on our department website um but current student work is normally only available to currently registered students unless they choose to put it online somewhere um but you can check out the research projects on our web pages if you look under um research students so you can find out what yinba is doing for example um okay another question is um do I know if the Tibetan Buddhist monument module is running next year as I've noticed it's been taken off the website recently um if it has it's I can check for you um so if you want to um so can I type anything in here because I could give you my email address and I can check for you because the reason I'm not sure is the person who teaches it might be going on sabbatical for one term and so that if that's true but it hasn't I don't know if it's been approved yet that's why it's not currently on the website um so if you want to email me um I can find out so my email is um are you can I type it anywhere mackey yes you can there's an option in the q and a box type your answer so you can type answer yes right in front of me okay so I will type my email jar okay so if you email me I can check that for you I mean it's provisional at the moment but I can check yeah and Stacy if you can maybe um tell us what your email address is so perhaps other students will be yeah okay I thought it only goes to one person okay so the email address is sp17 at so ask dot ac dot uk you can definitely find Stacy on our um website web pages stuff profiles so yeah just don't look for me on youtube there's so many embarrassing things like lectures and things that I wish I could change but now of course you will right but if you have questions about not just single modules but about the ma program please do email me another question is are there any other academics is there any other academic support other than a lectures and seminars for example writing support for your dissertation yeah um the dissertation in a way is treated like a module so it's 60 credits and you work on it you know it is independent work but there's a lot of support for it so there are dissertation training meetings with the whole cohort um you also are assigned a supervisor who you know supports you throughout so um there's a lot of support for the dissertation there's also support for other elements of what you're doing so people taking curating MA for example they get a lot of support on the um they produce an exhibition for example um and they get a lot of training and support in that so a lot of it is you know module specific but generally speaking there's a lot of um support and a lot of um interaction with the teachers so I think that's one of the things I really liked about so I asked when I came here many many years ago and it seems to be fortunately something we've been able to maintain and even kind of I would say improve over the years so I don't know whether whether people are typing or not wouldn't like to yeah to chat yeah so I would like to thank you Stacey and you invite for attending today's session thank you and students thank you for joining us once again if you have any questions feel free to reach out to Stacey to other program conveners I know they're very helpful and they will you know reply to your to your emails once again thank you very much this session will be available on our webpage the recording in in approximately uh fortnight so you'll be able to watch it um once again yeah I think I think we have we can finish now yeah so so once again thank you thank you goodbye