China: A Novel Xiaolu Guo in conversation with Professor Harriet Evans (University of Westminster)

Xiaolu Guo, a bilingual novelist and filmmaker, received her MA at Beijing Film Academy and UK's National Film & TV School. She published 6 books in Chinese before moving to London in 2002. Since then she has written her novels in English, notably: A Concise Chinese English Dictionary For Lovers (2007), 20 Fragments of A Ravenous Youth (2008), and UFO In Her Eyes (2011). Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Fiction Prize, the Dublin Impact Literary Award and her feature film She, A Chinese () received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival 2009. Her documentary Once Upon A Time Proletarian (2009) received the Grand Prix Geneva 2012, has shown in Central Pompidou Paris, MoMA New York and toured around the world.

Professor Harriet Evans, Director of the University of Westminster's Contemporary China Centre, was educated at the University of London's School of African and Oriental Studies, and Beijing University. Her publications include Women and Sexuality in China: Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (Polity Press, 1997), Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (co-edited with Stephanie Donald, Rowman and Littlefield, 1999) and The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). She is now working on an oral history of an 'old Beijing' neighbourhood. She was President of the British Association for Chinese Studies (2002-5) and is a regular consultant for BBC radio and non-governmental agencies on women, gender and human rights in China.

Recorded Dec 8th 2012

'Chinese robes, on (and off) European women' presented by Dr Sarah Cheang

In the late nineteenth century, if one were lucky enough to obtain an embroidered Chinese robe, it was a common enough practice to cut it up to make cushion covers and decorative trimmings for the home. By the 1920s, however, Chinese robes were also being worn as fashionable evening coats, having finally made the leap from sofa to body in European society. This paper considers the design, materiality and symbolism of the Chinese robe in European domestic spaces. What was it about these Chinese garments that made them so very culturally flexible during this period? And how important are these transitions between Chinese and Caucasian bodies, and between bodies and furniture in understanding the role that Chinese culture played in European lives?

Dr Sarah Cheang is Senior Tutor in History of Design at the Royal College of Art. Her research focuses on cultural exchange between East and West with a special interest in fashion, gender and the body. She is currently preparing two books for publication. One is titled Fashion and Ethnicity (Berg Publishers), and explores the ways in which ethnic identities are expressed and created using fashion. The other is called Sinophilia (I. B. Tauris) and is a history of fashion and Chinese material culture in Britain.

Recorded Dec 8th, 2012.

Q and A with Dongshin Chang (City University of New York), Simon Sladen (University of Winchester) and Anne Witchard, discussing their research that restores the history of China and Chineseness to the English stage - from Regency Extravaganzas, such as Chinese Sorcerer to chinoiserie theatre in the 1930s and Lady Precious Stream to subversive pantomime in Thatcher's Britain, Peter Nichols's Poppy at the RSC.
Recorded July 18th, 2012.

Dr Ashley Thorpe (University of Reading)
'Post-modern Chinese Opera: Re-citing China in Monkey: Journey to the West (2007)'

Leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics there was a surge of interest in China and its performing arts. In Britain, visiting troupes from China and British theatre companies satisfied this curiosity through a range of productions. However, none achieved the same visibility and commercial success as Monkey: Journey to the West (2007), based on the classic sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West purportedly written by Wu Cheng'en. This paper analyses the performance and explores the politics of depicting China through transnational citations. The production's preoccupation with paper lanterns, pentatonic scales, physical dexterity and antiquated spiritualism all suggest a stereotypical depiction of China steeped in Orientalism. Thorpe's paper argues that, whilst this reading is valid, the reflexive post-modern aesthetic of the production enabled it to transcend such criticisms. As clichés are exposed for what they are, the production focuses the audience onto the central message at the heart of the novel: the search for self-renewal and meaning beyond material reality.

Recorded July 18th, 2012.
Dr Ashley Thorpe is Lecturer in Theatre in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading, UK. His book, The Role of the Clown ('chou') in Traditional Chinese Drama, was published by the Edwin Mellen Press in 2007, and recent articles on aspects of Chinese and British Chinese performance have appeared in Theatre Research International, Studies in Theatre & Performance, Asian Theatre Journal and Contemporary Theatre Review. He co-organised the conference Contesting British Chinese Culture: Forms, Histories, Identities at Reading in September 2011 with Dr Diana Yeh, and is currently working on an edited book of the proceeds of the conference, as well as a monograph on British Chinese performance in the UK throughout the twentieth century.
Recorded July 18th, 2012.

Dr Dongshin Chang presents

'Chinese Sorcerer: Spectacle and Anglo-Chinese Relations'

The Chinese Sorcerer was an extravagant Easter spectacle put on at Drury Lane in 1823. While the story depicted the trials and adventures of the three sons of the Chinese emperor, Chinese Sorcerer drew upon contemporary relations between Britain and China, translating the current perception and knowledge of the country into the textual, visual, and aural realms of the production. Chinese Sorcerer made use of first-hand accounts, drawings, and paintings that offered the most recent observations of China and the strong commercial interest Britain had in the country. Reviews of Chinese Sorcerer reflected this and were mixed. On the one hand reviewers reported on its success and popularity as it met audience's expectations of experiencing China as a spectacular visual feast. On the other hand, reviewers expressed dismay at what they saw as the production's lack of substance and coherence. These reviews may be read as sharp social commentaries that questioned the value of theatrical spectacle and thus the essence of the material relationship Britain had built with China: the sensory novelty was crowd-pleasing but empty; the British had reached China to obtain its goods without any other interest in or understanding of the country.

Dongshin Chang (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Theatre, City University of New York) received a Research Award from the Society for Theatre Research in 2012 to complete his book project, China on the Historical London Stage. Chang examines London theatre productions that dramatized China from the late-seventeenth to the early twentieth century, looking at racial representation, geo-political dynamics, performing traditions in Diaspora, and national identity.

Recorded July 18th, 2012.

Dr Diana Yeh presents
'The Happy Hsiungs: Performing Race, Sex and Class in the Chinese Diaspora'

Despite the recent surge of interest in China internationally, there is a distinct lack of research on the cultural histories and interethnic relations of the Chinese in Britain. As a result, the British Chinese are still often perceived as an invisible and insular community who, by contrast to African Caribbean and South Asian groups in Britain, have had little social, cultural or political impact on the wider British society. This talk challenges such perceptions by recovering the lost histories of the husband and wife Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, two once highly visible but now largely forgotten writers who lived and worked in Britain from the 1930s onwards. Shih-I Hsiung shot to worldwide fame with his play Lady Precious Stream in the 1930s, while Dymia Hsiung was possibly the first Chinese woman to publish in the 1950s a fictional autobiography in English of her life in Britain. By focusing on how the Hsiungs sought acceptance in British society, this paper shows how they navigated multiple, co-existing discourses of 'Chineseness' by mobilising racial/ethnic, gendered, sexual and class identities. In particular, Yeh shows how they sought to negotiate the moral and sexual principles of the British nation through performances of an ideal nuclear family. Despite their initial fame, the Hsiungs' success was short lived, and their lives ultimately highlight the challenges and limits of their attempts to become accepted as modern subjects in British society.

Dr Diana Yeh teaches at Birkbeck College and at the University of East London. Her book on the Hsiungs, Entangled Identities is forthcoming with the Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai & Hong Kong University Press China Monograph series. She is also writing a book on British-based migrant Chinese artists, whose life histories encompass South Africa, China, Italy and Taiwan. While her earlier work explored contemporary 'British Chinese' art, her current research examines British East and Southeast Asian youth culture with a focus on clubbing, new media and popular music. She has published widely in these areas and has also presented her work on BBC Radio Four, and at institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society, the Wellcome Trust, National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain.

Recorded July, 18th 2012.

Dr Anne Witchard (University of Westminster) talks to Dr Diana Yeh (University of East London) and Dr Ashley Thorpe (University of Reading) about their research presentations.

Recorded July 18th, 2012.

Jeffrey Richards, Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University, presents his paper 'Dr Fu-Manchu and the Yellow Peril'

Jeffrey Richards is a leading cultural critic and nationally renowned expert on theatre and cinema history. He is the author of seminal books too numerous to list here, among the most recent are Films and British National Identity (1997), Imperialism and Music (2001), Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World (2005), Hollywood's Ancient Worlds (2008), John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre (with Kate Newey, 2010), and Cinema and Radio in Britain and America 1920-60 (Manchester University Press, 2010). He is currently the recipient of a large AHRC grant for a project on Victorian pantomime and popular entertainment.

Recorded May 31st, 2012.

Jeffrey Richards, Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University, discusses his paper 'Dr Fu-Manchu and the Yellow Peril'

Recorded May 31st, 2012.

Jeffrey Richards is a leading cultural critic and nationally renowned expert on theatre and cinema history. He is the author of seminal books too numerous to list here, among the most recent are Films and British National Identity (1997), Imperialism and Music (2001), Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World (2005), Hollywood's Ancient Worlds (2008), John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre (with Kate Newey, 2010), and Cinema and Radio in Britain and America 1920-60 (Manchester University Press, 2010). He is currently the recipient of a large AHRC grant for a project on Victorian pantomime and popular entertainment.

Anne Witchard is lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She is Principal Investigator of the AHRC funded research project, China in Britain: Myths and Realities. Her research interests are in the Fin de Siècle, London Studies, China Studies, Modernism and the Gothic. She is the author of Thomas Burke's Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Perversity of Chinatown (Ashgate 2007) and Lao She in London (Royal Asiatic Series Shanghai HKUP 2012) and co-editor of London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (with Lawrence Phillips) (Continuum, 2010). She is currently editing British Modernism and Chinoiserie for Edinburgh University Press.

Fan Bai discusses Talk of Home
http://www.ccubedmedia.co.uk/talkofhome/about-the-film.html

Fan Bai is founder and CEO of C Cubed Media Ltd, an independent production and consulting media company based in London with offices in Beijing, China. Having studied media production at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Fan went on to win the Royal Television Society Award for his documentary Visiting Marriage. While he was working for the BBC and various Chinese TV channels as a freelance cameraman / editor, Fan saw first hand the difficulties that existed for foreigners to start a career in the media industry in the UK.
C Cubed Media, short for China Culture Communications, was founded by Fan in 2007 with the simple aim to create a platform where people could build an understanding between China and Britain through cultural exchange. Fan and his team have worked to become the strategic video partners for the BBC Chinese World Service and China's Xinhua News Agency providing video reports of all culture related news and features to Chinese audiences around the world. With the company's rapid development, Fan has set the new goal for C Cubed Media to become an all-around media platform. But even with this his aims and dreams remains the same as does his passion for Chinese cultural exchange. And it was this vision and desire that brought up the creation of the documentary Talk of Home - The Chinese in Britain.

Taking inspiration from the 2010 UK General Election which had an unprecedented 8 Prospective Parliamentary Candidates from Chinese origins, the film Talk of Home is the culmination of nearly two years of work in both the UK and mainland China. With their PPC's personal success as the focus, Talk of Home chronicles the arrival of the first Chinese settlers in Britain 150 years ago through to modern day Chinese communities being an integral part of the very fabric of British society. The documentary seeks to highlight the positive contribution and key roles the Chinese people have in the UK while also exploring the nature of national identity against the backdrop of increasingly closer links enjoyed by the two nations.
Creating the Talk of Home Story

The Chinese in Britain have emerged into the light for the first time in a century and a half, leaving the restaurants and take-away shops and entering the mainstream in politics, commerce and education.
The face of Britain has been changing, literally, and the Chinese are playing a significant role in this exciting modernization of Britain.
The film-makers behind this documentary have enjoyed a fascinating journey through the UK and into China to focus on the stories of individuals who have settled in the UK, either to gain an education or to make a new home. We have come to understand the evolution of generations splintering off from a single tradition and weaving a new, two sided creation -- making a new identity for themselves combining ancient parental stems with new ideas and personas.

Recorded 10 May, 2012.

Lucy Sheen in conversation with Diana Yeh
Recorded 10 May, 2012.
Brought up by a white English family in the UK during the early 60s in pre-multicultural Britain, Lucy Sheen speaks about her experience of being a transracial adoptee.

Lucy Sheen has over thirty years of experience working in film, television, theatre and radio. She was born in Hong Kong, orphaned and then adopted by an English family. One of the first British-Chinese actresses to be accepted into a UK drama school, she graduated with a BA in Theatre Arts in 1984. Her first role was the female lead in the ground-breaking British film Ping Pong, directed by Po Chi'h Leong, the first feature film to explore the complex issues of the British-Chinese community. Though not in competition Ping Pong received critical acclaim at the Venice Film festival. Lucy is now in production with her independent documentary looking into the issues of trans-racial adoption and what it felt like growing up in the late sixties/early seventies as a British-Chinese.
http://www.lucysheen.com/#!film/cz0v

Ping Pong Actors Lucy Sheen and David Yip in conversation with Dr Diana Yeh
Recorded 10 May, 2012.

The Chinese presence in British cinema dates from James Williamson's 1900 'documentary' film, Attack on a China Mission, a recreation of that year's 'Boxer rebellion' in which nationalist militants attempted to expel Christian missionaries and other foreigners from China. It was actually filmed in Brighton and Williamson had never visited China. A 'yellow-face' tradition followed, most popularly the Fu Manchu movies stretching through to the 1970s craze for kung fu - not until the early 1980s did Asian-British filmmakers finally make some inroads into the British film industry. In 1986 the first truly Chinese-British feature, Ping Pong (1986), reached the screen. Directed by the British-born director Po-Chi Leong, who had directed several features in Hong Kong, the film was set in London's Chinatown, with a largely unknown cast -- except for David Yip, best known as TV's The Chinese Detective (BBC, 1981-82). Though critically lauded, however, the film failed to find the success it deserved, and neither it nor Mike Newell's Soursweet (1988) adapted from Timothy Mo's novel and scripted by Ian McEwan, has so far heralded the arrival of a healthy British-Chinese cinema. While China, Taiwan and Hong Kong-based directors like Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee and Wong Kar-Wai achieved arthouse and now mainstream success in Britain, other British-Chinese features such as BBC Film Peggy Su! (dir. Frances-Anne Solomon, 1998), failed to receive a proper release, despite favourable reviews. More recently Guo Xiaolu's award winning film, She, A Chinese (2009), a British film in terms of its financing and much of its location, also failed to achieve due recognition from the film trade press and distributors. However a new generation of British-born or British-based Chinese are at the vanguard of positive change, amongst them University of Westminster alumna, Jo Ho, who created the hit BBC television show, Spirit Warriors (the first British series to star a predominantly East Asian cast) and who is now working on several feature films, and award winning director, Belfast born Lab Ky Mo.

Actress, Lucy Sheen has over thirty years of experience working in film, television, theatre and radio. She was born in Hong Kong, orphaned and then adopted by an English family. One of the first British-Chinese actresses to be accepted into a UK drama school, she graduated with a BA in Theatre Arts in 1984. Her first role was the female lead in the ground-breaking British film Ping Pong, directed by Po Chi'h Leong, the first feature film to explore the complex issues of the British-Chinese community. Though not in competition Ping Pong received critical acclaim at the Venice Film festival. Lucy is now in production with her independent documentary looking into the issues of trans-racial adoption and what it felt like growing up in the late sixties/early seventies as a British-Chinese.
http://www.lucysheen.com/#!film/cz0v

Actor, David Yip has recently celebrated 38 years as an actor having left the E15 Acting School, London in 1973. He has worked in film, TV, theatre, and radio, both in the UK and internationally. David Yip is remembered by many for creating the role of Detective Sergeant John Ho, in 'The Chinese Detective' written by Ian Kennedy Martin for BBC TV (1980/1). Additionally, Yip played Dr Michael Choi, who with his family, moved into Channel Four's Brookside Close in the early eighties. His latest work - Gold Mountain is 'an astonishing and spellbinding production which combines the ancient art of storytelling with multi-media wizardry' (Daily Post)

'I have always been conscious of my cultural heritage, not just one but two. Being the son of a Chinese seaman from Canton and a mother from Liverpool, it hasn't always been easy to marry the two. Over my years as an actor, I have become more and more frustrated that so little writing comes from the British Chinese Community. I have appeared in countless dramas, films and documentaries about us but with someone else telling the wider world where, why and how we exist. I wanted to know where our own voice was and of course the answer is, it is in each of our lives, in each of our family and personal stories.'

Xiaolu Guo (author and filmmaker) introduces a screening of her film She, A Chinese
with Dr Anne Witchard (University of Westminster)
Recorded May 10th, 2012.

Xiaolu Guo's breakthough novel in Britain was A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). She first came to London on a British Council film scholarship in 2002, writing the novel in English and matching its enchantingly oddball East End love affair between a young Chinese girl and her ageing-hippie English lover with a touching and hilarious quest for a second language of love in a "rainy old capitalism country". Matching the success of her fiction, Guo's 'guerilla' films, produced on a shoestring and shot in China with amateur actors, have scored hits with juries and audiences on the festival circuit, She, a Chinese (2009) gained prizes in Locarno (Golden Leopard) and Hamburg (Montblanc Scriptwriting Award). The film is a riposte to Godard's chic Parisian Maoism in La Chinoise and gives us a further take on the East-West mistranslations and poignant entanglements of A Chinese English Dictionary.
Guo's distinctive work reflects her sense of being caught between Chinese and English and her experience growing up during China's astonishing transition from totalitarian enclave to the new shrine of global capitalism. Her latest film, UFO In Her Eyes (2011) is a sophisticated and amusing metaphor for the sense of alienation generated by China's rural upheaval and attendant political conundrums.

Actors Lucy Sheen in conversation with David Lee-Jones at the University of Westminster 18 July 2012

China in Britain: Myths & Realities is an AHRC funded research network project. Its central aim is to investigate changing conceptions of China and Chineseness in Britain by connecting up the important yet disparate work being done by cultural historians, literary critics, curators, archivists, contemporary artists, film makers and Sino-British organisations.

In bringing these specialists together, the project aims to provide a high profile platform for the discursive elaboration of the changing terms of engagement between British and Chinese people people and to widen the terms of debate from diaspora studies and simplistic reductions around identity to an inter-disciplinary network of research practice relevant to contemporary debate.

University public channel

Actor David Yip presenting his latest work Gold Mountain. davidyip.co.uk

China in Britain: Myths & Realities is an AHRC funded research network project. Its central aim is to investigate changing conceptions of China and Chineseness in Britain by connecting up the important yet disparate work being done by cultural historians, literary critics, curators, archivists, contemporary artists, film makers and Sino-British organisations.

In bringing these specialists together, the project aims to provide a high profile platform for the discursive elaboration of the changing terms of engagement between British and Chinese people people and to widen the terms of debate from diaspora studies and simplistic reductions around identity to an inter-disciplinary network of research practice relevant to contemporary debate.

University public channel

Extracts from Anna Chen's performance at the China In Britain events at Westminster University in London, 18th August 2012. With Charles Shaar Murray on guitar.
Songs: Anna May Wong Must Die! (extract), Yellowface, The Camellia and the Poppy (from The Steampunk Opium Wars).
Poem: The Diss Persists.

Organised by Dr Anne Witchard and Dr Diana Yeh.

Thanks to Paul Anderson for camera duties.
madammiaow.blogspot.co.uk

Zoe Baxter is a DJ and broadcaster with a keen interest in East Asian film, arts and music. luckykitty.blogspot.co.uk

China in Britain: Myths & Realities is an AHRC funded research network project. Its central aim is to investigate changing conceptions of China and Chineseness in Britain by connecting up the important yet disparate work being done by cultural historians, literary critics, curators, archivists, contemporary artists, film makers and Sino-British organisations.

In bringing these specialists together, the project aims to provide a high profile platform for the discursive elaboration of the changing terms of engagement between British and Chinese people people and to widen the terms of debate from diaspora studies and simplistic reductions around identity to an inter-disciplinary network of research practice relevant to contemporary debate.

China in Britain: Myths and Realities #6,
Diasporic Translations

Friday 24 May 9.30am–5.30pm

The Cayley Room University of Westminster 309 Regent Street London W1B 2UW

Entrance is free but strictly limited so it is essential to book your place by emailing Anne Witchard, anne@translatingchina.info

3PM ‘COSMOPOLITANS FOUR WAYS: ARTISTS OF HONG KONG’S VISUAL DIASPORA’ PAMELA KEMBER, INDEPENDENT ART CURATOR, DIRECTOR OF ASIA ART ARCHIVE, HONG KONG

The ‘cosmopolitan nomad’ articulates the state of existence of a number of migrant Chinese artists originally from Hong Kong who seem to inhabit a transnational existence, in the sense of constantly crossing borders, cultures and communities, internationally. This paper will examine the creativity of four such émigré Hong Kong artists, John Young (AUS), Paul Chan (USA), Suki Chan, (UK) and Simon Leung (USA) and focuses on specific diasporic subjectivites that informs their respective practices to date. The paper will examine the relationship between the diversity of their practices whilst dealing with specific frames of reference: concepts of memory, belonging and displacement.

Pamela Kember has lectured in Art History, Theory, Curatorial Studies and Art Writing at the Academy of Visual Arts, Baptist University, Hong Kong, the Department of Architecture, Chinese University, and Hong Kong Art School. Since her return to the UK, she has been curating, and lecturing on Asian Contemporary Artists of the Diaspora at Chelsea College of Art and Design, the Western Art Library of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the Library of the History of Art Department, Oxford University, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford where she worked on exhibitions such as the first Chinese Art of the diaspora in the UK, Silent Energy New Art from China, (1993) and Chinese Avant Garde post 89, (1994). Ms Kember has contributed to a host of publications and catalogues on contemporary art, including Asian Art News, World Sculpture News, Yishu, and Third Text. She continues to write and lecture internationally on artists from Asia and Europe and is a recent Advisory Editor and Contributor for a new dictionary for Oxford University Press: The Benezit Dictionary of Asian Artists (New York, 2012). She has also appeared on Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), BBC World News and BBC Radio 3.

3.30PM TRANSCULTURAL CURATING - GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART RACHEL MARSDEN, RESEARCH CURATOR, CHINESE ARTS CENTRE, MANCHESTER

Rachel Marsden is Research Curator (part-time) for Chinese Arts Centre (Manchester, UK) chinese-arts-centre.org and Coordinator (part-time) for the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts (CCVA) (Birmingham, UK and China) ccva.org.uk. She is also a PhD researcher at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (BIAD-BCU) examining the translation, through interpretation, of contemporary Chinese art in the West since 1980, specifically the idea of a transcultural curator. In addition, she is a visiting lecturer, independent curator, freelance arts writer and avid blogger in the field of contemporary Asian art, specifically contemporary Chinese art. She has recently returned from living and working in China for the past two and a half years and now lives and works between the West Midlands, Manchester and Birmingham (UK).
Blog: rachelmarsdenwords.wordpress.com
E: email@rachelmarsden.co.uk

This paper will discuss how the identity of contemporary Chinese art “transculturally” translates across different curatorial platforms and sites for display and exhibition, in a response to the public’s need to look beyond the local, regional and national to the international sphere. It will examine interdisciplinary examples and perspectives of translation and interpretation, such as the use of participatory programming and projects to encourage new “transcultural” (rather than cross-cultural) social relationships, networks and global exchanges between China and the West. It will provide examinations of how contemporary Chinese art is analysed, negotiated and presented to the international public audience in today’s changing domain of cultural globalisation, and question whether there is a new type of interpretive curatorial language being created through which to understand and deconstruct the artistic practices and artworks on display.

4PM AFTERNOON TEA SERVED IN ROOM UG05

4.15PM ‘THE FU MANCHU COMPLEX’ DANIEL YORK

Daniel York is a founding member of the British East Asian Artists’ group who have pressured the UK theatre industry to gain more opportunities for East Asian theatre artists. As a result of this pressure the Arts Council, Equity & SOLT/TMA recently sponsored an event at the Young Vic Theatre attended by 200 people to raise awareness of East Asian theatre practitioners which Daniel helped organise as a member of the event steering committee and he is currently Vice Chair of the Equity Minority Ethnic Members Committee. His play, The Fu Manchu Complex, will be produced at the Ovalhouse Theatre in London in autumn 2013.

Daniel York was born of mixed Singaporean/English parentage and grew up in the UK. His theatre work in London includes Mu-lan’s award winning production of Porcelain at the Royal Court which was seen by Alan Rickman who recommended him to play Fortinbras to his Hamlet at the Riverside Studios. Since then he has worked extensively in classical theatre with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. He played Edgar in an English/Chinese bi-lingual production of King Lear (dir. David Tse) which played at Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre and at the RSC’s Complete Works Festival. New plays include Nativity at Birmingham Rep, and the lead role in the UK premiere of Chinese playwright Wang Xiaoli’s In The Bag at Edinburgh Traverse Theatre as well as creating the role of Dave Li in Sun Is Shining at London’s King’s Head Theatre and Battersea Arts Centre before transferring for a run off-Broadway in New York. He then toured the USA in Aquila Theatre’s production of Aristophanes’ The Birds. Most recently he has appeared at the Old Vic Theatre in Branded and in the UK premiere of Brecht’s Turandot at London’s Hampstead Theatre.

Feature films include Rogue Trader, starring Ewan McGregor, The Beach opposite Leonardo Di Caprio and the action film Doom. Most recently he appeared in Act Of Grace, a triad thriller set in the North West and starring Leo Gregory, David Yip and Jennifer Lim. He has recently completed the Belfast-set Far Away again alongside Jennifer Lim which is scheduled to be screened at the Belfast Film Festival.

As a writer and director his feature film script Beautiful Friend has been developed by Film4 and a short film, Mercutio’s Dreaming: The Killing Of A Chinese Actor, was recently nominated for four awards at the World Music & Independent Film Festival. He was also selected as part of the Royal Court’s Unheard Voices initiative for emerging East Asian writers.

5PM CLOSING PANEL/SERIES OVERVIEW AND THE FUTURE

5.30PM DRINKS RECEPTION THE HEIGHTS, 14 LANGHAM PLACE

9.30AM COFFEE/WELCOME SERVED IN ROOM UG05

10AM ‘THE WORK OF MING-AI, LONDON, INSTITUTE 院 徽 涵 意 AND THEIR HISTORICAL PROJECT ON BRITISH CHINESE HISTORY’

Chungwen Li and Aubrey Ko will be talking about Ming-Ai, set up in 1993 to promote social, cultural, educational and economic exchanges among the peoples of Hong Kong, China and Britain ming-ai.org.uk

Chungwen Li is originally from Taiwan but brought up in Hong Kong. She has developed the British-Chinese heritage projects for Ming-Ai since 2009 and is interested in cultural comparative studies. Developed projects so far are East West Festive Cultures, ming-ai.org.uk/eastwest, The Evolution and History of British Chinese Workforce, ming-ai.org.uk/chineseworkforce, British Chinese Food Culture, britishchinesefoodculture.org.uk, and now a 3-year project, started in July 2012, British Chinese Workforce Heritage britishchineseheritagecentre.org.uk

Aubrey Ko is the Research and Development Co-ordinator for Ming-Ai. She has extensive experience in managing community, schools, and cultural projects in the UK. She was born in Hong Kong and started her career in educational publishing after she graduated from the Hong Kong University. She finished her Masters degree in Education at the University of Birmingham and then started working in the community sector in London.

10.30AM ‘ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE – THE HIDDEN LIVES OF THE CHINESE IN THE CARIBBEAN’ CHRYS CHIJIUTOMI, ASSOCIATE RESEARCH ASSISTANT FOR ‘CHINA IN BRITAIN: MYTHS AND REALITIES’ #6

This paper will examine the historical and contemporary presence of Chinese communities in the Caribbean and consider what ‘Chineseness’ means in an age of globalization and diaspora, looking at the socio-cultural impact and influences of Chinese Caribbean communities on artforms such as music, eg reggae, literature, theatre, dance, food cultures and visual art.

Chrys Chijiutomi works as a freelance Creative Producer/Artist Manager for camoci, running independent record label ‘camoci records’ and ‘camocivision’. She was Creative Producer of Arkestra Makara – a Pan-Asian chamber orchestra, created especially for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad with clarinetist/composer Arun Ghosh, culminating in a performance on the BT River of Music Asia Stage at Battersea Park. Arkestra Makara brought musicians together from across the continent, including Bhutan, India, Japan, the Maldives, Nepal, Burma, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Sri Lanka, as well as the UK. She is currently taking the MA, Culture Diaspora Ethnicity at Birkbeck College, University of London.

11AM MORNING COFFEE SERVED IN ROOM UG05

11.15AM ‘CHINA IN BRITAIN: CHINA IN THE CARIBBEAN’ DR JUDITH MISRAHI-BARAK, PAUL-VALÉRY UNIVERSITY

Few scholars have focused on the Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean, and it is only fairly recently that the literature written by Caribbean writers of Chinese origin has aroused some interest. I would like to interrogate the lack of visibility of Chinese-Caribbean writers, like Meiling Jin (The Song of the Boat Woman, 1996) and Jan Shinebourne (Time-Piece, 1986; The Last English Plantation, 1988; The Godmother and Other Stories, 2004; Chinese Women, 2010). Their ancestors arrived in Guyana in the 19th century as indentured workers, and are now considered as Caribbean writers of Guyanese origin living in the UK, the Chinese element being (almost) erased but not quite. I will also consider Patricia Powell since she is one of the writers of international renown who focuses on the Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean most strongly (The Pagoda, 1998), although she is not of Chinese origin but is a Jamaican-American writer. Looking at the small Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean through the eyes of writers of Chinese origin but also through the eyes of a Caribbean-American writer will allow me to gain a perspective at the crossroads and raise a few questions about the recent emergence of Chinese-Caribbean literature.

Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak is Associate Professor at Paul-Valéry University Montpellier 3, where she teaches English and Postcolonial Literatures. She read English Literature at the University of Paris 3 and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Fontenay-aux-Roses, passed the Agrégation and presented a Doctorate on the Writing of Childhood in Caribbean Literature. Her publications include a variety of articles on Caribbean writers and the Caribbean diaspora as well as an interview with Cyril Dabydeen (Commonwealth, 2001) and book chapters in edited collections: La Ville Plurielle dans la Fiction Antillaise Anglophone (2000); Lignes d’horizon – Récits de Voyage de la Littérature Anglaise (2002); Voices and Silence in the Contemporary Novel in English (2009); Hybridation Multiculturalisme Postcolonialisme (2009); Littérature et Esclavage (2010). She has organised several international conferences with invited writers. She is General Editor of PoCoPages, a series in the collection ‘Horizons Anglophones’, published by the Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. The latest volume she co-edited is Another Life (2012). Diasporas and Cultures of Mobilities is forthcoming (2013). pulm.fr/

11.45AM DIASPORIC MIGRATIONS PANEL CHAIRED BY DR DIANA YEH

12PM ‘HOW JIM WAS SHANGHAIED: 1930s SHANGHAI AND ITS LASTING INFLUENCE ON THE WRITING OF JG BALLARD’ DUNCAN HEWITT, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY IN SHANGHAI

The unique environment of the Shanghai of the 1930s and ‘40s has exerted a lasting influence on the world of English literature through its impact on the distinctive vision of the writer JG Ballard. This paper looks at how Shanghai’s rampant consumerism, highly developed media culture and constant threat of violence influenced not only those of Ballard’s works which deal explicitly with his Shanghai childhood, but also the author’s writing and worldview throughout his career. It’s something Ballard initially denied, but came to acknowledge in his later years – though it’s a connection which has yet to be embraced by the Shanghai authorities.

Duncan Hewitt is a former BBC China correspondent who now writes for Newsweek and other media from Shanghai, and teaches Journalism and Chinese Media at New York University’s Shanghai centre, where he is also an advisor to the Shanghai Studies Symposium. He first lived in China from 1986-7, while studying for his degree in Chinese from Edinburgh University. A brief spell as an extra in the filming of Empire of the Sun at that time gave him a lasting interest in both Shanghai history and the work of JG Ballard. He has an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from SOAS, and is the author of Getting Rich First – Life in a changing China, (Vintage, 2008). In 2011 he was a journalist fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University, where he researched the relationship between China and the Western media.

12.45PM ‘EAST WEST CONNECTIVITIES IN TWO DANCES: RED DETACHMENT OF WOMEN (1964), AND THE NIGHTINGALE (1981)’ DR GERALDINE MORRIS, ROEHAMPTON UNIVERSITY

The paper examines the notion of identity by reference to two dance works created in contrasting nations, the Peoples Republic of China and the United Kingdom, and considers the extent to which an aesthetic object can be a representation of a country’s culture. Using a multidisciplinary approach, Morris will examine the ways in which opposing ideologies merge in these works producing an East/West fusion. Red Detachment of Women (1964), created by a collaborative team of three, Li Chengxiang, Jiang Zuhui and Wang Xixian, was made in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution. It was conceived as a patriotic, anti-bourgeois work, derived entirely from Chinese values and yet is suffused with Western ideals and imagery. The Nightingale (1981) choreographed by Frederick Ashton, the founder choreographer of the Royal Ballet, is a hybrid work, comprising dance and song mixing East and West but perceived as Western. Dances are identified mainly through their choreography, so a dance which embodies a Western style of movement can ever only be partially Eastern, whatever the narrative content. In Red Detachment of Women, while the story, sets and costume are evidently Chinese, the movement and form is balletic and embraces a Western aesthetic. In contrast, The Nightingale borrows from Chinese regional dance but is framed by British balletic culture. The paper demonstrates that by teasing out the complexities of a dance work, the perception of its cultural identity can be both disturbed and challenged.

Geraldine Morris danced with the Royal Ballet Company and subsequently completed a PhD. She now works as a Senior Lecturer at Roehampton University and has recently published a book on choreographic style, Frederick Ashton’s Ballets: Style Performance Choreography.

1.15PM DIASPORIC CULTURAL TRANSLATIONS PANEL CHAIRED BY DR ANNE WITCHARD

1.30PM BUFFET LUNCH SERVED IN ROOM UG05

2.15PM ‘ONLY CONNECT: NEW MEDIA AND CHINESE OVERSEAS FROM THE AGE OF THE TELEGRAPH TO THAT OF THE INTERNET’ JEFFREY WASSERSTROM, CHANCELLOR’S PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

This presentation will look at comparisons and contrasts between the ways that different technologies of communication have fascinated and been used by Chinese to keep in touch with one another and learn about the world from the 1870s through the present. Points of departure will include globe-trotter Li Gui’s accounts of telegraphy in his book about his 1876 trips around the world; the role that circular telegraphs played in political struggles of the late 1800s and early 1900s; the significance of the then-very-new form of email in spreading word of the Tiananmen rising among Chinese studying in the West; and the growing importance of blogs, microblogs, online only journals, and other digital forms in connecting people within and beyond China.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2010 – updated edition due out this summer) and co-editor of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (University of California Press, 2012). He has written for many periodicals, including The New York Times, The Guardian, New Left Review, and the TLS. He is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine and an Asia editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Archiving: China in Britain #5
Saturday April 27th, 2013 9:30AM – 5:00PM
The Boardroom,
309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

09:30AM Coffee/welcome

10:00AM ‘Shifting tastes in Chinese art: a history of the Berkeley Smith collection of Chinese ceramics at Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum (1921-1958)’ Louise Tythacott (University of Manchester )

In September 1921, Stanley Berkeley Smith (1878-1955), a British banker based in Karachi, offered his collection of Chinese ceramics on long term loan to Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum. It comprised over 800 pieces, including sets of large celadon chargers and ornately decorated blue and white dishes. Berkeley Smith had spent the previous 21 years acquiring these objects in India at considerable personal expense – this was, for its time, Britain’s largest collection of non-court Chinese ceramics exported to the sub-continent. A Chinese porcelain room was duly opened at the Museum in 1923, dedicated to Berkeley Smith’s collection and celebrated as ‘a treasure in Cheltenham’. Tastes in Chinese ceramics, however, were changing. From the late 1920s until the 1950s, Cheltenham’s curator, D. W. Herdman, invited dealers and curators from London to inspect Berkeley Smith’s collections. These metropolitan connoisseurs displayed a marked disdain for the banker’s tastes, preferring simpler archaeological wares from China. One influential Oriental dealer, Edgar Bluett, even recommended that some of Berkeley Smith’s pieces were not ‘museum worthy’ and thus should be disposed of. So it was that between 1946 and 1960 hundreds of his pieces were sold at auction in Cheltenham and at Sotheby’s in London. Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum today holds fewer than 150 pieces from the original Berkeley Smith collection.

This paper will examine the relationship between the collector, the museum and the art market over a period of more than 30 years through close analysis of letters in the archives. It will explore the impact of one dealer, in particular, on the future of the objects, and will also discuss how Berkeley Smith’s collection became entangled in the shifting landscapes of connoisseurship and taste in Chinese art at this time.

Dr Louise Tythacott is a Lecturer in Museology at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the interpretations of Chinese material culture in museums. She has worked in various capacities in museums, latterly as the curator of Asian collections at Liverpool Museum (1996-2003), part of the National Museums Liverpool. Her latest book, The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display, was published by Berghahn in 2011.

10:30AM ‘Let’s talk about the money’ Helen Wang (Dept of Coins and Medals, The British Museum)

Helen Wang looks after the Museum’s collection of East Asian coins and banknotes. Her special interests include the archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943), his extensive collections, the Silk Road and the use of textiles as money. She has published on fascinating aspects of the British Museum’s East Asian money collection: for example, Chinese secret society money and membership certificates; the logistics of transporting copper for coinage in nineteenth century China; paper money design in Shanghai in the 1900s; bronze token money of Jiangsu province in the 1930s; and images of Mao Zedong on Chinese money in the twentieth century.

11:00AM Coffee

11.15AM‘The First Chinese Books in London’ Frances Wood (Keeper of China Collections at the British Library)

Frances Wood studied Chinese at the universities of Cambridge, Peking and London and is Curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library. Among her books are a translation of Dai Houying's novel Ren a ren! (Michael Joseph, 1992), Did Marco Polo Go To China? (Secker And Warburg, 1995), No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China 1843-1943 (John Murray, 2000), Hand Grenade Practice in Peking: my part in the Cultural Revolution (John Murray, 200), The Silk Road (University of California Press, 2002), The Blue Guide to China (revised edition, 2002), The Forbidden City (British Museum Press, 2005), The Lure of China (Yale University Press, 2009), and The Diamond Sutra (British Library, 2010).

11:45AM Panel/Questions

12:15PM ‘Mapping An Archive of Chinese Representations in British Cinema’ Hiu M. Chan (University of Cardiff)

This presentation will introduce a database that Hiu M. Chan has been compiling of British films that represent China and Chineseness from the beginning of British cinema history. Her analysis will focus on such questions as when the theme of translating China in Britain film became popular, and the impact of these films in British society.

Hiu M. Chan is a Film and Cultural Studies PhD candidate at Cardiff University. Her thesis focuses on comparisons and possible translation between Chinese and Western film theory. She has published ‘Butterfly and Spinning Top’ in Inception and Philosophy (2011), where she uses ancient Chinese philosophy and Daoist writing on dreams to interpret the film Inception. hiuandfilm.wordpress.com about

12:45 Title TBA Katie Hill (Sotheby’s)

Dr Katie Hill has extensive experience in the field of contemporary Chinese art. Her recent work includes In Conversation with Ai Weiwei, Tate Modern; selector panel/author, Art of Change, New Directions from China, Hayward Gallery, London, and specialist advisor for The Chinese Art Book (Phaidon 2013). She also co-edited a special issue of the journal Visual Art Practice on Contemporary Chinese Art and Criticality, published in 2012. She is director of OCCA (Office of Contemporary Chinese Art) – an art consultancy promoting Chinese artists in the UK.
  
1:30PM – 2:30PM Buffet Lunch served – all welcome

2:30PM ‘The Historical Photographs of China Project’ Robert Bickers (University of Bristol)

Since 2006, the Historical Photographs of China project has been locating, digitising, and publishing online thousands of photographs of China from the pre-1949 period. Mainly located in private hands, mostly from families in Britain with a historic connection to China, they cover a wide variety of subjects and locales, and range from the 1860s to the 1940s. The resource is open access, and currently holds over 8,000 images, with many more being processed. Its associated portal ‘Visualising China’ offers access across additional online collections. This talk introduces the project and its development, as well as some of its core collections, and discusses some of the issues this work has raised.

Robert Bickers is Professor of History at the University of Bristol and Director of the British Inter-University China Centre bicc.ac.uk
Historical Photographs of China project: hpc.vcea.net
Visualising China: visualsingchina.net
Project blog visualisingchina.net/blog

3:00PM Afternoon Tea

3.15PM ‘Found In Time: My Shanghai Heritage’ Peter Hibbard MBE, (Former President and Founder of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society)
Today Shanghai plays host to nearly 200,000 foreign residents and aspires to restore its former status as Asia’s premier international centre for trade, finance and commerce. In the 1930s over 10,000 Britons called Shanghai home and although only a dwindling number of pre-1949 residents still survive, their legacy of Britain in China has now been transposed as relatives search for the China of their forbears. Aided by expanding physical and online archives, genealogical sites and social network forums, as well as the availability of travel to China, many British families are reconstructing maps of their heritage that cross generations and continents. Some are fortunate in holding substantial family archives and these have been of keen interest to a small group of academics, but it is more often the case that only fragments of the past have survived because so much was lost in periods of turbulence from the late 1930s to the early 1950s.

Most remarkably, former foreign libraries and archives, including those of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Shanghai Municipal Council, whose fate was previously unknown and many feared lost, have been opened to the public in the past decade providing inspiration and sustenance to scholars and to those piecing together personal or corporate histories. Despite the onslaught of modern development, substantial swathes of once foreign-owned Shanghai houses remain, and numerous personal and institutional artefacts are adding another dimension to an archival history that has been distanced by time and dispossession. In many ways Shanghai’s past physical form and its social ethos have been officially catalogued and displayed as something removed from the modern city. This presentation will explore issues related to recovering the past, and the resources available, and will highlight the cases of various families. It will also discuss efforts to provide platforms that assist interested parties in recognising and sharing their heritage.

Peter Hibbard MBE is a Shanghai-based historian, heritage consultant, author and travel professional who strives to foster an understanding and appreciation of Shanghai’s unique historical inheritance. He is particularly concerned with connecting the past with the present, and in 2007, following an absence of over 50 years, he resuscitated the former North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai. He has published widely, including The Bund Shanghai: China Faces West (2007) and Beyond Hospitality: The History of The Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels, Ltd. (2010)
shanghai-flaneur.com

3.45PM ‘Maoist posters in London: A perspective from the University of Westminster’ Emily Williams (University of Westminster)

The Chinese Visual Arts Project was established at the PCL, and the first public exhibition of posters was held in April 1979. With generous help from a small number of colleagues and friends in the China field who had visited or lived on the mainland, the core of the present collection was quickly established, extending back into the 1960s.

Emily Williams is a research assistant at the University of Westminster's Chinese Poster Collection (chinaposters.westminster.ac.uk), where she is working to catalogue and digitise the university's collection of Chinese posters dating from the 1950s to the early 1980s. She is also a PhD student at the London Consortium (Birkbeck College, University of London), where she is studying British interactions with Cultural Revolution objects, focusing on collections and exhibitions of these objects, both during the Cultural Revolution and since.  

5:00PM Drinks Reception venue TBA

British East Asian Actors
STATEMENT
30th October 2012

The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)
The Orphan of Zhao

For more than three weeks, we have protested to the RSC and the Arts Council England about the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of the Chinese classic The Orphan of Zhao.

Our concern is that there are only three actors of East Asian descent in a cast which consists mainly of Caucasians but no other Asians. This does not, in our opinion, represent "multi-cultural casting" as the RSC insists it is.

We have identified the following issues:

1) The RSC states that "It's certainly not the case that we've not employed any Chinese or East Asian actors". However, we have only been able to ascertain two actors of East Asian descent employed as part of regular seasons in the past 20 years, as well as two others in standalone productions - a clear shortfall. It also appears that, as far as we can gather, none of the three RSC Winter Season directors has any noticeable track record of employing East Asian actors and, in fact, only Gregory Doran appears to have done so, once, in the last ten years.

2) Of particular concern to us is the under-representation of East Asian actors in what is often described as "the Chinese Hamlet". Unfortunately, this is reflective of the entire UK theatre industry.  The RSC assures us that the three East Asian actors (who we wish well) are playing "key" roles. Whilst we value and supportall actors and would hope that all roles in a play are "key", none of the three East Asians in this particular production appears to be playing what can be described as a "leading" or "protagonist" role: a character who is central to the action and who drives the play. It is also clear that all three are roughly in the same age demographic and this belies the diversity and experience that exists among British East Asian actors.

3) British East Asian actors wish to participate in their own culture but this is being denied us. We are too often excluded from roles which are not East Asian-specific, yet when roles arise thatare, we are also excluded. We applaud colour-blind casting, but colour-blind casting was created as a mechanism to afford more opportunities for all minority actors, not to give additional opportunities to Caucasian actors. At present, colour-blind casting fails British East Asians.

4) The RSC has cited the need to cast actors across three different plays as one reason for the low number of East Asians in the cast. It appears they were unable, for whatever reason, to countenance the idea of British East Asians playing leading roles in works by Ji, Pushkin and Brecht. It appears that white (and in some cases black) actors are able to play Chinese roles but not vice versa.

5) The RSC states that they met "lots and lots" of East Asian actors, yet we have only been able to ascertain eight. Aside from the three who were cast we only know of one who met more than one of the season's directors.

6) The RSC insist they cast "the best actor for the roles available" yet the visibility and quality of work available for the actors chosen to be leading players in the Company simply isn't attainable for actors of East Asian descent. There is no level playing field.

*****

It is clear to us that there is an industry-wide problem regarding the opportunities available for East Asian actors. Too often, actors from our background can only access auditions for poorly-written and stereotyped roles on television that require a heavy emphasis on being "foreign" as opposed to being integrated and three-dimensional members of British society. In the theatre, with the occasional rare exception, we are shut out completely from all but community and children's theatre, with opportunities to appear in classical and mainstream drama extremely rare.

We welcome a time when actors can play across race, gender, class or disability. However, this can only meaningfully occur on a level playing field to which we must ensure we have fair access.

As a publicly-funded company, the RSC has a responsibility to reflect the make-up of society. In order to tear down the limitation on East Asian actors, it is our heartfelt wish to see far more active outreach to our sector. When the Harry Potter film franchise was casting for an actress to play Cho Chang, applicants queued around the block, disproving the notion that people from East Asian backgrounds have no interest in the performing arts. At present, the message being sent out to young people from East Asian backgrounds is that a career on the stage is not available to them.

We welcome greatly the closing paragraph from the RSC's most recent statement on the subject:

"We acknowledge that there is always more to do and recognise our responsibility in this area. We want to explore the rich seam of Chinese drama further, and engage more often with Chinese and East Asian actors. We want to integrate them more regularly on our stages and hope that this production, and indeed this debate, will be a catalyst for that process."

In order to enable this to happen we request:

1) An apology and acknowledgement for the lack of consideration afforded us as an ethnic group with regard to the casting of The Orphan of Zhao and for the way East Asian actors have been marginalised.

2) A public discussion forum to be held in London with Greg Doran and the two directors of the other plays in the trilogy, with speakers of our choosing to represent our case. Similar to that held at La Jolla Playhouse, CA, when comparable controversy occurred with their musical adaptation of The Nightingale, the purpose of this is to enable us to work with the RSC in leading the way for the rest of the industry.

3) Ethnic monitoring of auditionees for both race-specific and non-race-specific roles and for that data to be freely available. We would also like to remind all Arts Council England funded theatre companies of Recommendation 20 from the Eclipse Report which highlighted several recommendations for theatre practice with regard to ethnic minorities including:

"By March 2003, every publicly funded theatre organisation in England will have reviewed its Equal Opportunities policy, ascertained whether its set targets are being achieved and, if not, drawn up a comprehensive Positive Action plan which actively develops opportunities for African Caribbean and Asian practitioners."

For too long East Asians have been left out of "Asia".

4) Further to the above we would like to see a clear measurable target in terms of engaging and developing East Asians actors as you do with a broad range of socio-economic and ethnic minority backgrounds with a view to seeing and casting them in future RSC productions.

5) We feel it is absolutely imperative that there be no "professional reprisals" with regard to any recent comments from within our community. East Asian actors and professionals have shown great courage speaking out about the clear inequality that currently exists within our profession, and we would like that to be respected. Too often, there exists a climate of fear in the arts world and we feel this is detrimental to free speech as well as to fundamental human rights.

We hope very much that we can all move forward together and gain greater understanding for the future. We look forward to working with the RSC, a company for which we all have the fondest love and respect.

British East Asian Actors
30th October 2012

Daniel York – Vice Chair, Equity Minority Ethnic Members’ Committee
Anna Chen
Dr. Broderick D.V. Chow - Lecturer in Theatre, Brunel University, London
Kathryn Golding
Paul Hyu – Artistic Director, Mu Lan Theatre Co; member of Equity Minority Ethnic Members’ Committee
Michelle Lee
Chowee Leow
Hi Ching – Artistic Director, River Cultures
Jennifer Lim
Lucy Miller – Associate Director, True Heart Theatre
Dr. Amanda Rogers - Lecturer in Human Geography, Swansea University

 

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China in Britain #4 Aesthetics: Visual and Literary Cultures
Saturday Dec 8th 2012 – Time 9:30:AM – 4:00PM
The Cayley Room, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

9:30AM Coffee and welcome
10:00AM ‘Chinese robes, on (and off) European women’, Sarah Cheang (Royal College of Art)

In the late nineteenth century, if one were lucky enough to obtain an embroidered Chinese robe, it was a common enough practice to cut it up to make cushion covers and decorative trimmings for the home. By the 1920s, however, Chinese robes were also being worn as fashionable evening coats, having finally made the leap from sofa to body in European society. This paper considers the design, materiality and symbolism of the Chinese robe in European domestic spaces. What was it about these Chinese garments that made them so very culturally flexible during this period? And how important are these transitions between Chinese and Caucasian bodies, and between bodies and furniture in understanding the role that Chinese culture played in European lives?

Dr Sarah Cheang is Senior Tutor in History of Design at the Royal College of Art. Her research focuses on cultural exchange between East and West with a special interest in fashion, gender and the body. She is currently preparing two books for publication. One is titled Fashion and Ethnicity (Berg Publishers), and explores the ways in which ethnic identities are expressed and created using fashion. The other is called Sinophilia (I. B. Tauris) and is a history of fashion and Chinese material culture in Britain.

10:30AM ‘China’s Architectural Modernism. A Case of Multiple Modernities?’, Edward Denison (The Bartlett, University College London)

With building traditions spanning nearly five millennia, China boasts the longest continuous architectural lineage in history. Today, the country’s architectural aspirations are equally unprecedented, forming an omnipresent backdrop to the country’s high–rise, glass–clad, lust–for–wealth. However, linking past and present was a period of modernisation that revolutionised China’s architectural landscape and has been largely overlooked. China’s encounter with architectural modernity in the first half of the twentieth century remains relatively under-researched and uniquely complicated - no other country was so variously divided by foreign power, giving rise to exceptional diversity in architectural theory and practice. These architectural experiences fit uncomfortably within conventional theories of architectural modernism in which a purely Western phenomenon was dispersed around the world from its source in Europe and North America and diluted by local influences as it went. The concept of ‘multiple modernities’, a recent theoretical development in social sciences that has yet to be applied to architectural studies, challenges this view and offers a more effective way of comprehending the unique complexity of China’s architectural experience. This presentation will introduce some of the many Chinese and foreign architects that practiced in China up until 1949 and explore their work in the context of China’s swift encounter with modernity. Among the most significant aspects of this encounter was Manchuria, annexed by Japan in 1931. In Manchuria, entire cities were planned and built and an architectural drama of an unprecedented scale and variety was played out, offering twenty-first century historians an insight into one of the most unprecedented and important manifestations of modernism outside the West - where the formation of an architectural modernism in China derived not from the West, but from the East.

Edward Denison is an architectural historian, writer and photographer. By focussing on themes in architecture and design that are academically and geographically remote, his work explores intellectual preconceptions based on difference, such as modern/traditional, centre/periphery, and East/West. His PhD (shortlisted for the RIBA President's Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis 2012) in Architectural History at the Bartlett, UCL, examined architecture and the landscape of modernity in China up to 1949. He teaches at the Bartlett, where his seminar series, 'Multiple Modernities,' forms part of the postgraduate course.

Guangyu Ren is a researcher and consultant specialising in architecture and the built environment. Having trained in China and Australia, she has worked for numerous international organisations in Asia and Africa and published books on architectural histories in these contexts including. Guangyu is now based in London where she works as an advisor to firms working in China and co-authors books on architecture and design with Edward Denison.

Joint publications include: Luke Him Sau, Architect: China's Missing Modern (Wiley, anticipated publication date Autumn 2014); Life of the British Home (Wiley, 2012); McMorran & Whitby (RIBA, 2009), Modernism in China – Architectural Visions and Revolutions (Wiley, 2008), Building Shanghai – The Story of China’s Gateway (Wiley, 2006), and Asmara – Africa’s Secret Modernist City (Merrell, 2003).

11:00AM Coffee

11.15AM ‘‘Constructing the Narrow Bridge of Art: Katherine Mansfield, Ling Shuhua and Virginia Woolf’, Patricia Laurence (City University of New York)

This paper will explore the personal, literary and aesthetic crossings among three female writers from England and China in 1920s -1930s. Ling Shuhua, a talented short story writer, was described as ‘the Chinese Katherine Mansfield’ at the same time as Katherine Mansfield was being translated into Chinese in 1920s; Virginia Woolf admired ‘the charm of the unlikeness’ of Ling Shuhua's writing and had a personal correspondence with her in the late 1930s. The style of chinoiserie, feminism and the aesthetic of modernism will be woven into this conversation.

Patricia Laurence is a writer, critic, biographer, and professor of English at the City University of New York. She has an interest in transnational modernism and China, and has published The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford, 1993), and Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China. This book was translated into Chinese in 2009 and is available as an e-book. She is currently working on a biography of Elizabeth Bowen.

11:45PM Panel/Questions

12:15PM The Chinese Taste in a Neoclassical Age’, David Porter (University of Michigan)

Abstract tbc

David Porter is professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, where he is also a Faculty Associate with the Center for Chinese Studies.  He is the author of Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, 2001) and The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2010), as well as the editor, most recently, of Comparative Early Modernities: 1100-1800 (Palgrave, 2012).

1:00PM - 2:00PM Buffet Lunch served – all welcome

2:00PM From Picturing the Chinese to ‘21st Century (British) Types’, Grace Lau

The Imperialists’ 19th century views of the Chinese were based on drawings and photographs made by early travellers to China. These travellers were composed of scientists gathering data for ethnography, anthropology, medicine, botany etc;  missionaries on their cause to convert the heathens; military on infiltration campaigns – and photographers and artists. So the general assumptions about the peoples and culture of China were based on the wholly subjective aesthetics of this motley crew who were united in their vision only so far as to document the exotic Chinese for the avaricious Victorian public. My book Picturing the Chinese (Joint Publishing: Hong Kong, 2005) follows the photographers who descended on China from the 1850s, when photography was just invented, when the Opium Wars were destroying China and opening up her trade ports and when British overseas power was fast expanding Eastwards. Subsequent to this book I had an idea about how to respond to this former situation as an artist/photographer. Why don’t I reverse that situation and photograph the exotic 21st century diverse society in Hastings where I now live, and label them as ‘21st Century Types’ as the scientists had documented the ‘Oriental types’. The Arts Council funded my project in 2005, and I reconstructed a Chinese photography portrait studio along the seafront in Hastings. Then I invited passersby to enter and pose, with all their contemporary accoutrements. I documented a total of 400 subjects, a selection of which were exhibited in London, in Wales, Brighton and Hastings, as well as the Tate Britain. My presentation summarises this 5-year work, from my book on Western views of the Chinese to how I address, or redressed, this issue to create my own aesthetics of the ‘21st century types’.

A practising photographer, lecturer and writer, Grace Lau was born in London of Chinese parentage. She has a degree in documentary photography from Newport College of Art; a BA in Media Studies from University of Westminster and MA from London College of Communications. A retrospective of her photography covering the sub-culture of fetishism appears in Adults in Wonderland (Serpents Tail, UK, 1997). Grace has exhibited widely and her work is in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Michael Wilson Centre and David & Sarah Kowitz.

2:30PM Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking (Penguin, 2012) in conversation with China historian, Frances Wood (Keeper of China Collections, British Library)

Paul French has lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. He is a widely published analyst and commentator on China and his major focus of interest is the growing power of the emerging Asian middle class and China’s shifting demographics. He has also written a number of books on China including, Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand (HKUP, 2006) – the biography of the legendary Shanghai-based journalist, adventurer and ad man from the 1930s; Through the Looking Glass (HKUP, 2009) a study of China’s foreign press corps from the 1840s to the 1950s; and The Old Shanghai A-Z (HKUP, 2010), a guide to the streets, businesses, nightclubs and people of old Shanghai in its glittering heyday. His most recent book, Midnight in Peking (Penguin, 2012), a work of literary non-fiction investigating the real life murder of a 19-year-old English girl in 1937 has been a New York Times Bestseller, a Radio 4 Book of the Week, and is to be made into an international mini-series by Kudos Film & Television in the UK. He is publishing a Penguin Special e-book, The Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking, attempting to recover the once notorious 1930s foreign-run Badlands of Beijing.

Frances Wood studied Chinese at the universities of Cambridge, Peking and London and is Curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library. Among her books are a translation of Dai Houying's novel Ren a ren! (Michael Joseph, 1992), Did Marco Polo Go To China? (Secker And Warburg, 1995), No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China 1843-1943 (John Murray, 2000), Hand Grenade Practice in Peking: my part in the Cultural Revolution (John Murray, 200), The Silk Road (University of California Press, 2002), The Blue Guide to China (revised edition, 2002), The Forbidden City (British Museum Press, 2005) and The Lure of China (Yale University Press, 2009), The Diamond Sutra (British Library, 2010).

3:00PM Afternoon Tea

3:15PM  China: A Novel  Xiaolu Guo in conversation with Professor Harriet Evans (University of Westminster)

Xiaolu Guo, a bilingual novelist and filmmaker, received her MA at Beijing Film Academy and UK's National Film & TV School. She published 6 books in Chinese before moving to London in 2002. Since then she has written her novels in English, notably: A Concise Chinese English Dictionary For Lovers (2007), 20 Fragments of A Ravenous Youth (2008), and UFO In Her Eyes (2011). Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Fiction Prize, the Dublin Impact Literary Award and her feature film She, A Chinese () received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival 2009. Her documentary Once Upon A Time Proletarian (2009) received the Grand Prix Geneva 2012, has shown in Central Pompidou Paris, MoMA New York and toured around the world.

Professor Harriet Evans, Director of the University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre, was educated at the University of London's School of African and Oriental Studies, and Beijing University. Her publications include Women and Sexuality in China: Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (Polity Press, 1997), Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (co-edited with Stephanie Donald, Rowman and Littlefield, 1999) and The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). She is now working on an oral history of an ‘old Beijing’ neighbourhood. She was President of the British Association for Chinese Studies (2002-5) and is a regular consultant for BBC radio and non-governmental agencies on women, gender and human rights in China.

5:00PM Drinks Reception (venue tbc)

China in Britain #3 Performance/Theatre and Music
July 18th 2012 – Time 9:45:AM – 5:30PM
The Old Cinema, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

9:30AM Coffee and welcome
9:45AM ‘Chinese Sorcerer: Spectacle and Anglo-Chinese Relations’

Chinese Sorcerer was an extravagant Easter spectacle put on at Drury Lane in 1823. While the story depicted the trials and adventures of the three sons of the Chinese emperor, Chinese Sorcerer drew upon contemporary relations between Britain and China, translating the current perception and knowledge of the country into the textual, visual, and aural realms of the production. Chinese Sorcerer made use of first-hand accounts, drawings, and paintings that offered the most recent observations of China and the strong commercial interest Britain had in the country. Reviews of Chinese Sorcerer reflected this and were mixed. On the one hand reviewers reported on its success and popularity as it met audience’s expectations of experiencing China as a spectacular visual feast. On the other hand, reviewers expressed dismay at what they saw as the production’s lack of substance and coherence. These reviews may be read as sharp social commentaries that questioned the value of theatrical spectacle and thus the essence of the material relationship Britain had built with China: the sensory novelty was crowd-pleasing but empty; the British had reached China to obtain its goods without any other interest in or understanding of the country.

Dongshin Chang (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Theatre, City University of New York) received a Research Award from the Society for Theatre Research in 2012 to complete his book project, China on the Historical London Stage. Chang examines London theatre productions that dramatized China from the late-seventeenth to the early twentieth century, looking at racial representation, geo-political dynamics, performing traditions in Diaspora, and national identity.

10:30AM ‘“Did you ever see such a succulent dish of Chinese takeaway?”: Peter Nichols's Poppy - Political Panto at the RSC’

In 1982 the RSC presented Peter Nichols’s Poppy in their inaugural season at their new home in London’s Barbican Centre. Using the past as a metaphor for the present, Poppy’s depiction of the Anglo-Chinese (Opium) Wars resonated strongly with contemporary society. Poppy draws comparisons between the reigns of two strong women, Queen Victoria and Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and by way of theatrical juxtapositioning, criticises the present by evoking the past. With Mayor Dick Whittington as its central character, Poppy utilises many of the traditions of Victorian pantomime, but subverts them in order to create what Nichols called “a custard pie full of razor blades.” A pantomime in which the Principal Girl suffers from opium addiction and the pantomime horse is murdered for meat is hardly traditional family fare; nevertheless it still teaches a chilling moral and suggests that Britain in the 1980s was still coming to terms with the loss of Empire, trying to hold on to the alleged ‘Good Old Days’ as Act One, Scene Two’s musical number suggests whilst discussions took place over Hong Kong’s transfer of sovereignty. This paper will explore the reasons behind setting Poppy in Victorian Britain and detail how Nichols uses the genre of pantomime to make a political statement, paying close attention to representations of China, which replaces the usual Morocco setting in British pantomime’s Dick Whittington narrative. Audience participation, stock character roles and pantomime’s many other conventions will also be considered as Sladen argues that Poppy can be read as an outcry against, not only Thatcherism, but Nationalism and the celebration of Britain’s colonial past.

Simon Sladen is currently studying for his PhD at the University of Winchester - ‘What’s in a Name? The Role of Celebrity in the British Pantomime Industry 1980-2010’. He is Chief Pantomime Critic for the British Theatre Guide and reviews around 25 pantomimes each season, as well as filing monthly Pantomime Season Updates and interviewing a wide cross-section of the industry’s practitioners. In 2011 he was invited to contribute to Channel 4’s documentary Seven Dwarves and later that year appeared on Canalside Radio to discuss pantomime’s many differing traditions and practices. He has had two pantomimes published by LazyBee scripts and lectures on the genre on the University of Winchester’s MA in Popular Performances. In December 2011 Simon organised the first ever ‘Panto Day’ on Twitter, with over 100 theatres getting involved to celebrate the national institution using social media.

11.15AM QUESTIONS chair Dr Anne Witchard

11:30AM Coffee

11.45AM ‘The Happy Hsiungs: Performing Race, Sex and Class in the Chinese Diaspora’

Despite the recent surge of interest in China internationally, there is a distinct lack of research on the cultural histories and interethnic relations of the Chinese in Britain. As a result, the British Chinese are still often perceived as an invisible and insular community who, by contrast to African Caribbean and South Asian groups in Britain, have had little social, cultural or political impact on the wider British society. This talk challenges such perceptions by recovering the lost histories of the husband and wife Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, two once highly visible but now largely forgotten writers who lived and worked in Britain from the 1930s onwards. Shih-I Hsiung shot to worldwide fame with his play Lady Precious Stream in the 1930s, while Dymia Hsiung was possibly the first Chinese woman to publish in the 1950s a fictional autobiography in English of her life in Britain. By focusing on how the Hsiungs sought acceptance in British society, this paper shows how they navigated multiple, co-existing discourses of ‘Chineseness’ by mobilising racial/ethnic, gendered, sexual and class identities. In particular, Yeh shows how they sought to negotiate the moral and sexual principles of the British nation through performances of an ideal nuclear family. Despite their initial fame, the Hsiungs’ success was short lived, and their lives ultimately highlight the challenges and limits of their attempts to become accepted as modern subjects in British society.

Dr Diana Yeh teaches at Birkbeck College and at the University of East London. Her book on the Hsiungs, Entangled Identities is forthcoming with the Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai & Hong Kong University Press China Monograph series. She is also writing a book on British-based migrant Chinese artists, whose life histories encompass South Africa, China, Italy and Taiwan. While her earlier work explored contemporary ‘British Chinese’ art, her current research examines British East and Southeast Asian youth culture with a focus on clubbing, new media and popular music. She has published widely in these areas and has also presented her work on BBC Radio Four, and at institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society, the Wellcome Trust, National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain.

12:15PM ‘Post-modern Chinese Opera: Re-citing China in Monkey: Journey to the West (2007)’

Leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics there was a surge of interest in China and its performing arts. In Britain, visiting troupes from China and British theatre companies satisfied this curiosity through a range of productions. However, none achieved the same visibility and commercial success as Monkey: Journey to the West (2007), based on the classic sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West purportedly written by Wu Cheng’en. This paper analyses the performance and explores the politics of depicting China through transnational citations. The production’s preoccupation with paper lanterns, pentatonic scales, physical dexterity and antiquated spiritualism all suggest a stereotypical depiction of China steeped in Orientalism. Thorpe’s paper argues that, whilst this reading is valid, the reflexive post-modern aesthetic of the production enabled it to transcend such criticisms. As clichés are exposed for what they are, the production focuses the audience onto the central message at the heart of the novel: the search for self-renewal and meaning beyond material reality.

Dr Ashley Thorpe is Lecturer in Theatre in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading, UK. His book, The Role of the Clown (‘chou’) in Traditional Chinese Drama, was published by the Edwin Mellen Press in 2007, and recent articles on aspects of Chinese and British Chinese performance have appeared in Theatre Research International, Studies in Theatre & Performance, Asian Theatre Journal and Contemporary Theatre Review. He co-organised the conference Contesting British Chinese Culture: Forms, Histories, Identities at Reading in September 2011 with Dr Diana Yeh, and is currently working on an edited book of the proceeds of the conference, as well as a monograph on British Chinese performance in the UK throughout the twentieth century. 

1:00PM – 2:00PM buffet lunch served – all welcome

2:00PM Actors Lucy Sheen in conversation with David Lee-Jones who is currently playing the lead in William Shakespeare’s Richard III, on tour now until 25th August - see thefestivalplayers.co.uk/Find-A-Venue_1.html His casting marks his fourth collaboration with director Michael Dyer, and makes him the first British East Asian actor to play one of Shakespeare’s English kings in the UK theatre.

‘Chinese and East Asian actors in this country are usually pigeonholed in casting, when they are cast at all,’ Lee-Jones says. ‘That needs to change, but I don’t believe that colour-blind casting is a useful term. It is more meaningful to acknowledge and confront the assumptions an audience attaches to particular performers based on their physical attributes … we do not plan to make race issues the overt focus of my performance - or the production. Our first obligation is to tell this great story with energy, pathos and humour. But if I do my job well, and if my background stirs debate, it can only change assumptions for the better.’

David Lee-Jones has received critical applause for his previous roles with Dyer’s Festival Players - as Rosalind in an all-male As You Like It (2007), as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (2008), and as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice (2009). A graduate of the University of York and the Academy Drama School, his other work includes A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Southwark Playhouse), Chicken (Hackney Empire Studio), The Grammar of Love (Oval House), and the upcoming feature film Elevator Gods. He is an Artistic Associate of Yellow Earth Theatre.

Lucy Sheen got her first role as the female lead in Ping Pong (1986) dir. Po Ch’h Leong and starring David Yip – a ground breaking film which explored the complex issues faced by the British-Chinese community. Lucy has over 30 years experience as a theatre actor. In 1987 she spent a season at Bristol Old Vic as part of Company 3, a multiracial theatre company. Their first production was Julius Caesar (dir. Roger Rees) in which Lucy played Portia. She then found herself in Palestine doing research for the legendary Joint Stock theatre company’s production The Promised Land the day the Intifada broke out, in 1987. In 1991, her performance as Ioka, in Drink The Mercury at The Bolton Octagon was nominated for the TMA Best Supporting Actress drama award, the first time that a British-Chinese actress had been nominated for a major UK Theatre award. In 2010 she appeared as Pin-de in Tim Luscombe’s new play Hungry Ghosts and was nominated for an OFFIE award as best actress in a play. In January 2011 she was part of the David Hare retrospective at the Sheffield Crucible playing Mme. Ong in Plenty (dir Thea Sharrock). In November 2011, Lucy wrote and performed her own one-woman play. In April 2012 her second theatre work, Waiting, a 10 minute play for two actresses was picked as one of the final 18 plays to be part of The REDfest 2012 at The Old Red Lion Theatre Pub. Lucy has just come back from filming in Rome and Hong Kong for Italian Actor/Director/Writer Luca Barbareschi on his new feature film working along side Chinese starlet Zhang Jingchu. She is now continuing to develop her writing across a variety of projects including a stage three hander looking into the issues of transracial/transnational adoption and identity, and the forgotten story of four WWII Japanese Comfort women.

2:45PM Actor, David Yip has recently celebrated 38 years as an actor having left the E15 Acting School, London in 1973. He has worked in film, TV, theatre, and radio, both in the UK and internationally.  David Yip is remembered by many for creating the role of Detective Sergeant John Ho, in ‘The Chinese Detective‘ written by Ian Kennedy Martin for BBC TV (1980/1). Additionally, Yip played Dr Michael Choi, who with his family, moved into Channel Four’s Brookside Close in the early eighties.Today he will present his latest work - Gold Mountain – ‘an astonishing and spellbinding production which combines the ancient art of storytelling with multi-media wizardry’ (Daily Post)

‘I have always been conscious of my cultural heritage, not just one but two. Being the son of a Chinese seaman from Canton and a mother from Liverpool, it hasn’t always been easy to marry the two. Over my years as an actor, I have become more and more frustrated that so little writing comes from the British Chinese Community. I have appeared in countless dramas, films and documentaries about us but with someone else telling the wider world where, why and how we exist. I wanted to know where our own voice was and of course the answer is, it is in each of our lives, in each of our family and personal stories.’

Gold Mountain is a two-man show written together with Kevin Wong and performed by David Yip and Eugene Salleh. It premiered at The Unity Theatre in Liverpool, in October 2010, to critical and public acclaim, followed by performances in Montreal at CINARS. It was voted best fringe production by Liverpool Daily Post Arts Awards 2010 and returned to Montreal’s 2011 Festival Trans Amerique. This year Gold Mountain played at The Unity in Liverpool, followed by performances in Sweden and then The Albany Theatre, Deptford. The show will return to Canada in October/ November 2012 to play in Vancouver followed by performances in Montreal in January/February 2013. For tour dates to follow, see davidyip.co.uk

3.45PM Zoe Baxter is a DJ and broadcaster with a keen interest in East Asian film, arts and music. Her show Lucky Cat on Resonance Radio (104.4 fm), now in its sixth series, delivers a wonderfully eclectic mix of Korean Punk, Chinese Hip Hop, ‘Asia Beat’ Reggae and Rhythm & Blues, Japanese Ska, Thai Country, and Singapore 60’s Pop - plus whatever is up to the minute and happening in East Asian culture. luckykitty.blogspot.co.uk

4:30PM tea

4:45PM Anna Chen is a British East Asian performer, writer, broadcaster, slam poet and blogger. Her widely acclaimed one-woman shows, Suzy Wrong – Human Cannon (1994) and Anna May Wong Must Die! (2011) combine satire, sex and politics to chart ‘the rise and rise of East Asian women and the funny, lewd and sometimes brutal depiction of them’. She has been variously described as a ‘wise and wonderful creature,’ and a ‘transgressive being’ with ‘a disposition somewhere between a frolicking lamb and a rutting teenager that just discovered it was Britney.’
Time Out. Chen also writes and presents for radio. Her play, Red Guard, Yellow Submarine, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2004; she wrote and presented the groundbreaking ten-part history series, Chinese In Britain (2007); her profile of the Hollywood legend, Anna May Wong: A Celestial Star In Piccadilly, was broadcast in 2009, and her investigation into Western clichés of Chinese music, Chopsticks At Dawn, in 2010. She is currently working on her first novel Coolie, a tale of the Chinese workers who built the first transcontinental railroad across America. ‘I started writing about this in 1993 so it’s already taken longer than the construction of the actual railroad.’ Earlier this year she produced a musical extravaganza the Steampunk Opium Wars at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Her blog, Madam Miaow Says, was shortlisted in the 2010 Orwell Prize for blogs and stands at number 52 in the Total Politics Best Left of Centre Blogs, and at number 31 in their Best Media Bloggers awards for 2011. madammiaow.blogspot.co.uk

You are warmly invited to the third in the University of Westminster/AHRC funded series

China in Britain: Myths and Realities
Theatre/Performance and Music

July 18th 2012 – Time 9:45:AM – 5:30PM
The Old Cinema, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Entrance - including lunch and refreshments - is free of charge so for catering purposes it is essential to book your place by emailing anne@translatingchina.info

The day will present an eclectic programme with presentations from actors and broadcasters and equally exciting academics (!) Dongshin Chang (City University of New York), Diana Yeh (Birkbeck College and University of East London), Simon Sladen (University of Winchester) and Ashley Thorpe (University of Reading) will present research that restores the history of China and Chineseness to the English stage - from Regency Extravaganzas, such as Chinese Sorcerer to chinoiserie theatre in the 1930s and Lady Precious Stream. We will look at subversive pantomime in Thatcher’s Britain, Poppy, and more recently Anna Chen’s Steampunk Opium Wars and Damon Albarn’s opera Monkey: Journey to the West.
      The UK’s most high profile British Chinese actor, David Yip, remembered by many for his role as Detective Sergeant John Ho in The Chinese Detective will be talking about his new multimedia show Gold Mountain. There will be performances from comedienne, poet and political pundit, Anna Chen (aka Madame Miaow), actor David Lee-Jones, currently the lead in Richard III - the first British Chinese actor to be cast as one of Shakespeare’s English Kings - and Resonance Radio’s Lucky Cat DJ, Zoe Baxter, playing Korean Punk, Chinese Hip Hop and Reggae, Japanese Ska, Thai Country, and Singapore 60's pop.

The University of Westminster's Old Cinema can make the proud claim of being the birthplace of British cinema. Here, in 1896, the Lumière brothers put on the first public show of moving pictures in this country. Now a space of fascinating historical interest, the Regent Street Old Cinema has retained its stage, decorative gilding, barrel vaulted ceiling and boasts a working 1936 Compton organ. A refurbishment campaign is underway to restore the theatre to its original Victorian glory. birthplaceofcinema.com

China in Britain: #1. Film - May 10th, 2012

Because of our support for UCU Strike Action on May 10th, the venue has been transferred to Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh St., Russell Square, London WC1H OXG

soas.ac.uk/gallery

10:00AM Coffee/welcome

10:30AM ‘Peking at the Pictures: Early Cinema, the Boxer Rebellion, and Anglo-American Perspectives on China’, Ross Forman (University of Warwick).

The Chinese presence in British cinema dates from James Williamson's 1900 'documentary' film, Attack on a China Mission, a recreation of that year's “Boxer rebellion” in which nationalist militants attempted to expel Christian missionaries and other foreigners from China. It was actually filmed in Brighton and Williamson had never visited China.

Ross Forman’s book China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

11:30AM ‘Po-chih Leong, Britain's Forgotten Filmmaker', Felicia Chan (University of Manchester) and Andy Willis (University of Salford).

In the early 1980s British Asian filmmakers began to make inroads into the British film industry. The the first truly British Chinese feature, Ping Pong reached the screen in 1986. British-born director Po-Chi Leong (b. 1939) had already directed several features in Hong Kong. Ping Pong, set in London's Chinatown, had a largely unknown cast except for David Yip, best known as TV's The Chinese Detective (BBC, 1981-82). To date Leong has directed 25 films and TV projects yet remains unknown in academic accounts of Chinese and British filmmaking. His work spans genres including Hong Kong-style comedy (Super Fool/Long gan wei, HK 1981; Banana Cop/Ying lun pi pa, HK 1984), serious drama (Hong Kong 1941/Dang doi lai ming, HK 1984, Ping Pong, UK 1986), horror (The Wisdom of Crocodiles, UK 1998, The Darkling, USA 2000), action movies (The Detonator, USA 2006), large scale historical dramas (Shanghai 1920/Shang Hai yi jui er ling HK/China 1991) and television documentary (Riding the Tiger, UK C4 1997 & 1998). This survey of Leong’s career spanning 40 years across different commercial industries, national cinemas and diverse genres is the beginning of a line of questioning that allows us to re-think the position of British Chinese filmmaking within the histories of British and Chinese cinemas.

Felicia Chan is RCUK Fellow in Film, Media and Transnational Cultures at the University of Manchester. Her research interests lie in the construction of national and cultural imaginaries in film and other cultural texts. She has published in a number of journals and edited collections and is co-editor of Genre in Asian Film and Television: New Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Andy Willis is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Salford. He is co-author of The Cinema of Alex de la Iglesia (MUP, 2007), editor of Film Stars: Hollywood and Beyond (MUP, 2004) and co-editor of Spanish Popular Cinema (MUP, 2004). He is currently co-editing, with Wing-Fai Leung, a volume on East Asian film stars for Palgrave.

12:30PM - 2:00PM Buffet Lunch served – all welcome

2:00PM - 2:45PM Jo Ho’s Spirit Warriors

A new generation of British-born or British-based Chinese are at the vanguard of positive change, among them is University of Westminster alumna, Jo Ho who created the hit BBC television show Spirit Warriors, the first British series to star a predominantly East Asian cast. Jo Ho is currently working on several feature films.

2:45PM Afternoon Tea

3:00PM Xiaolu Guo, author and filmmaker will introduce a screening of her film She, A Chinese, followed by a Q and A.

Xiaolu Guo’s breakthough novel in Britain was A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). She first came to London on a British Council film scholarship in 2002, writing the novel in English and matching its enchantingly oddball East End love affair between a young Chinese girl and her ageing-hippie English lover with a touching and hilarious quest for a second language of love in a "rainy old capitalism country". Matching the success of her fiction, Guo’s ‘guerilla’ films, produced on a shoestring and shot in China with amateur actors, have scored hits with juries and audiences on the festival circuit, She, a Chinese (2009) gained prizes in Locarno (Golden Leopard) and Hamburg (Montblanc Scriptwriting Award). The film is a riposte to Godard’s chic Parisian Maoism in La Chinoise and gives us a further take on the East-West mistranslations and poignant entanglements of A Chinese English Dictionary.
Guo’s distinctive work reflects her sense of being caught between Chinese and English and her experience growing up during China’s astonishing transition from totalitarian enclave to the new shrine of global capitalism. Her latest film, UFO In Her Eyes (2011) is a sophisticated and amusing metaphor for the sense of alienation generated by China’s rural upheaval and attendant political conundrums.

Future Events
Do be sure to register for our next event China in Britain: Film #2 on Thursday, May 31st by emailing: anne@translatingchina.info
See details of the day, which includes a screening of Soursweet and Q and A with director, Mike Newell, at translatingchina.info

China in Britain: #3 Theatre and Music will be held in our lovely Old Cinema* on July 31st. Confirmed speakers include actor David Yip who will be talking about his current multimedia show Gold Mountain, broadcaster, comedienne, poet and political pundit, Anna Chen (aka Madame Miaow), Zoe Baxter who hosts Lucky Cat on London’s avant-garde Resonance Radio (104.4 fm), playing Korean Punk, Chinese Hip Hop and Reggae, Japanese Ska, Thai Country, and Singapore 60's pop - plus equally exciting academics (honestly!) - Dongshin Chang (City University of New York), Simon Sladen (University of Winchester), and Diana Yeh (University of East London), who will present research that restores the history of China and Chineseness to the English stage - from seventeenth-century court masques to pantomime in Thatcher’s Britain.

* The University of Westminster's Old Cinema can make the proud claim of being the birthplace of British cinema. Here, in 1896, the Lumière brothers put on the first public show of moving pictures in this country. Now a space of fascinating historical interest, the Regent Street Old Cinema has retained its stage, decorative gilding, barrel vaulted ceiling and boasts a working 1936 Compton organ. A refurbishment campaign is underway to restore the theatre to its original Victorian glory. birthplaceofcinema.com

Upcoming China in Britain: Myths and Realities events
#4 Aesthetics - Literary Studies, Visual Arts and Design,
#5 Internet/Cyberspace,
#6 Curatorial/Museum Studies

Date: May 31st 2012

Time: 09:45 AM – 16:45PM

Location: Room 451, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Programme: RSVP – Entrance is free but strictly limited so it is essential to book your place by emailing

anne@translatingchina.info

9:45AM coffee/welcome Anne Witchard, Principal Investigator, and Diana Yeh, Research Fellow

10:00AM Screening of Soursweet (1988)

11:50AM coffee

12:15PM Presentations of their work by filmmakers Rosa Fong and Lab Ky Mo

Lab Ky Mo is an award winning screenwriter and director of innumerable short films, commercials, teen soaps, Hollyoaks and The Cut, and the controversial feature film Nine Dead Gay Guys (2002), reviewed by the Sunday Express as “the most outrageous and original British film of the year.” My Dad the Communist (2009) and recent projects The Bruce Lee Bus and My Triad Summer Holiday, are stories of British-Chinese boyhood in the 1980s.

Rosa Fong is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Edge Hill University. She is an industry professional with more than 15 years' experience working on feature films and documentaries, and as a director/producer in independent film and television. Her films have won awards from the BFI and Arts Council of England. Rosa has worked in Hong Kong as a commercials director and the UK directing music videos for MTV and Partizan. More recently she was Associate Producer on the award-winning Cut Sleeve Boys (2006), dubbed the first British-Chinese gay feature film, and she is currently writing several feature film scripts for the UK market.

1:30PM – 2:30PM lunch

Red (1996) Dir. Rosa Fong

2:30PM Director Mike Newell will talk about Soursweet followed by a roundtable with Lab, Rosa, and actress Lucy Sheen

Lucy Sheen has over thirty years of experience working in film, television, theatre and radio. She was born in Hong Kong, orphaned and then adopted by an English family. One of the first British-Chinese actresses to be accepted into a UK drAMa school, she graduated with a BA in Theatre Arts in 1984. Her first role was the female lead in the ground-breaking British film Ping Pong, directed by Po Chi’h Leong, the first feature film to explore the complex issues of the British-Chinese community. Though not in competition Ping Pong received critical acclaim at the Venice Film festival. Lucy is now in production with her independent documentary looking into the issues of trans-racial adoption and what it felt like growing up in the late sixties/early seventies as a British-Chinese.

Mike Newell has been directing and producing films for screen and television, both in the UK and Hollywood, since 1977. After the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2005, he was confirmed third most commercially successful British director in recent years by the UK Film Council. He won the BAFTA Award for Best Direction in 1994 for Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the BAFTA Britannia Award for Artistic Excellence in Directing in 2005. His film adaptation of Great Expectations will be released later this year.

3:30PM tea

3:45PM Jeffrey Richards, Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University, will present his paper ‘Dr Fu-Manchu and the Yellow Peril’

Jeffrey Richards is a leading cultural critic and nationally renowned expert on theatre and cinema history. He is the author of seminal books too numerous to list here, among the most recent are Films and British National Identity (1997), Imperialism and Music (2001), Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World (2005), Hollywood's Ancient Worlds (2008), John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre (with Kate Newey, 2010), and Cinema and Radio in Britain and AMerica 1920-60 (Manchester University Press, 2010). He is currently the recipient of a large AHRC grant for a project on Victorian pantomime and popular entertainment.

Date: 10 May 2012

Time: 10.00AM - 6.00PM

Location: Room 451, 309 Regent St, London W1B 2UW

The Chinese presence in British cinema dates from James Williamson's 1900 'documentary' film, Attack on a China Mission, a recreation of that year's 'Boxer rebellion' in which nationalist militants attempted to expel Christian missionaries and other foreigners from China. It was actually filmed in Brighton and WilliAMson had never visited China. A 'yellow-face' tradition followed, most popularly the Fu Manchu movies stretching through to the 1970s craze for kung fu - not until the early 1980s did Asian-British filmmakers finally make some inroads into the British film industry. In 1986 the first truly Chinese-British feature, Ping Pong (1986), reached the screen. Directed by the British-born director Po-Chi Leong, who had directed several features in Hong Kong, the film was set in London's Chinatown, with a largely unknown cast – except for David Yip, best known as TV's The Chinese Detective (BBC, 1981-82). Though critically lauded, however, the film failed to find the success it deserved, and neither it nor Mike Newell’s Soursweet (1988) adapted from Timothy Mo’s novel and scripted by Ian McEwan, has so far heralded the arrival of a healthy British-Chinese cinema. While China, Taiwan and Hong Kong-based directors like Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee and Wong Kar-Wai achieved arthouse and now mainstream success in Britain, other British-Chinese features such as BBC Film Peggy Su! (dir. Frances-Anne Solomon, 1998), failed to receive a proper release, despite favourable reviews. More recently Guo Xiaolu’s award winning film, She, A Chinese (2009), a British film in terms of its financing and much of its location, also failed to achieve due recognition from the film trade press and distributors. However a new generation of British-born or British-based Chinese are at the vanguard of positive change, AMongst them University of Westminster alumna, Jo Ho, who created the hit BBC television show, Spirit Warriors (the first British series to star a predominantly East Asian cast) and who is now working on several feature films, and award winning director, Belfast born Lab Ky Mo (who will be speaking alongside Soursweet director Mike Newell, China in Britain #2 May 31st).

Programme:

10AM Coffee/welcome Anne Witchard, Principal Investigator, and Diana Yeh, Project Research Fellow

10.30AM ‘Peking at the Pictures: Early Cinema, the Boxer Rebellion, and Anglo-American Perspectives on China’, Ross Forman (University of Warwick).

11.30AM ‘Po-chih Leong, Britain's Forgotten Filmmaker', Felicia Chan (University of Manchester) and Andy Willis (University of Salford).

12.30 - 2PM lunch
2 – 2.45PM Jo Ho will talk about her work.

2.45PM Tea 3PM Guo Xiaolu (Author and filmmaker) will introduce a screening of her film She, A Chinese
Followed by Q and A

RSVP - Places are free but strictly limited so it is essential to register by emailing:

anne@translatingchina.info

... based at the University of Westminster will connect up the important yet disparate work being done by historians, literary critics, curators, archivists, contemporary artists, film makers and Sino-British organisations. In bringing these specialists together, the project aims to provide a high profile platform for the discursive elaboration of the changing terms of engagement between British and Chinese people and to widen the terms of debate from diaspora studies and simplistic reductions around identity to an inter-disciplinary network of research practice relevant to contemporary debate.

A series of six day colloquia at the University of Westminster in five different subject areas* will connect up the important yet disparate work being done by cultural historians, literary critics, curators, archivists, contemporary artists, film makers and Sino-British organisations. In bringing these specialists together, the project aims to provide a high profile platform for the discursive elaboration of the changing terms of engagement between British and Chinese people and to widen the terms of debate from diaspora studies and simplistic reductions around identity to an inter-disciplinary network of research practice relevant to contemporary debate.

* #1 and #2 Film, #3 Theatre and Music, #4 Aesthetics - Literary Studies, Visual Arts and Design, #5 Internet/Cyberspace, #6 Curatorial/Museum Studies

... investigating changing conceptions of China and Chineseness in Britain. The ultimate aim of the project is to contribute towards the ongoing reformulation of both British and Chinese cultural understandings in the context of a multicultural Britain still structured by racialised inequalities and Orientalist stereotypes.

China in Britain: Myths and Realities, in the light of China’s emerging global profile as a country of major economic and political impact, Chinese visibility is undergoing significant transformations. Interest in Chineseness has seen an upsurge concomitant with that of our interest in fostering economic relationships with China. Yet when government leaders across Europe are pronouncing the failure of multiculturalism what does it mean to be integrated in Britain as a visible minority? Although the British-Chinese voice has been marginal in mainstream cultural and political life it is beginning to make itself heard.

Translating China will explore the current and potential future course of Chinese-British relations and the place of history within it.

Tweets by @chinamyths

BBC Pie


Beyond the Takeaway


British Born Chinese


British Born Chinese blog


British Chinese Society


Chi 2


China Beat


China Rhyming


Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester


Chinese in Britain


David Yip


Dimsum - British Chinese Community Website


Half & Half - UK Eurasian history


Huffington Post — China page


Jottings From The Granite Studio


Link Chinese UK


Lucky Cat Resonance FM


Madam Miaow


Ming Ai


Mu-lan Theatre Company


New Voice


One Inch Punch


The Red Mansion Foundation


Rita Cheng


Robert Bickers


Sinopticon


Talk of Home


True Heart


Visible Chinese


Yellow Earth Theatre


Graham Chan