Following the presentation of the Manifesto and Learning Plan I wanted to look at my next sources of research. I wanted to cover two site visits to view examples of primary evidence and look at curation styles with a gallery/museum context.
I first of all visited SOAS to go to the Brunei gallery and the Foyle Special collections gallery.
At the entrance of the Brunei gallery there is an exhibition of Chinese landscape paintings known as Shanshui, and painted by contemporary landscape artist Xu Longsen.
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The paintings are watercolour on lightweight ingres lined paper. Each depicts a strongly vertical mountain scene and the sense of altitude and clouds are suggested with patterns of black vertical sweeping rock on white paper. One painting envelopes the central column in the gallery space and also displays a vertical mountain reaching into the skylike lightwell above.
The second gallery contains the Foyle collection. Here there is a beautifully painted examples of porcelain donated from the David Percival collection.
Also I took in an exhibition of Moroccan carpets which showed an interesting example of an installation of a weaving loom, small sitting stools and flattened baskets. These displays presented me with ideas about presentation and sense of place within a gallery context alongside traditional ways of presenting paintings and photos of objects and scenes.
Later in the day I travelled to Oxford to visit the Ashmolean Museum. I had recalled that I had seen an exhibition of Chinese objects, some of which were donated by the V&A museum. I took photos of the Ancient World exhibition area and in particular of the exhibition of 'China to AD 800' which looks at the originations of writing, and craft styles from ancient china, through han, song, yuan, zhou, and tang dynasties.
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Upstairs there was a further exhibition of China from AD 800.
Within the attached gallery to China to AD 800 there is an exhibition of Art in China in the 1960s and 1970s. The painting depicted scenes of state and worker, happily working away in the factories and the fields.
http://jameelcentre.ashmolean.org/collection/6980/9413
Actually it was not so much the paintings that I found so interesting, but a chance meeting with an learner of mandarin called Jenny. She was taking an MPhil at Clarendon Institute and learning chinese characters as part of her studies. I asked her how she learnt the characters and what the study requirements were.
She aimed to learn about 100 characters a week, with 10 a day, by writing each character about 100 times.
I discussed the difficulties of remembering them and she agreed that the more basic ones could be remembered such as the radicals. She also pointed out that on her course, they revisit characters each couple of days to retain them in memory. Jenny pointed me to look at Matilda Lawrence, a female missionary who travelled to China in the 1860s and is mentioned at the Birmingham City archives. She is a similar to Robert Morrison who translated texts about 20 years before. I suggested that I would like to find focused samples of people who are learning Chinese for surveys and interviews, and she pointed me again to academics and students at The Institute for Chinese Studies, Clarendon Institute University of Oxford enquiries@chinese.ox.ac.uk, http://www.orinst.ox.ac.uk/ea/chinese/index.html, The University of Cambridge, and also The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Oxford as a city has a surprisingly large number of Chinese students and visitors and so is a promising place to return to do further research.
Other links on University of Oxford Chinese studies here:
http://www.chinacentre.ox.ac.uk/
http://www.ox.ac.uk/international/oxford_around_the_globe/china.html
http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/ (lots of links to courses)
http://www.ccsp.ox.ac.uk/
http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/FDTL/index.shtml
http://www.bicc.ac.uk/
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