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October 11, 2002
Depicting
Otherness: Images of San Francisco's Chinatown
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Isaiah
West Taber, Dupont Street, Chinatown, San Francisco,
n.d.
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"They're
a perk of the job," says Associate Professor of Art Anthony
Lee, smiling as he scans the hundreds of art books lining his
office walls. He chooses one and flips to a glossy print of Edouard
Manet's Olympia to help illustrate another perk of teaching
at Mount Holyoke—diverse students who allow diverse interpretations
of art. "At Mount Holyoke I don't have to defend analyzing
a painting in terms of gender or sexuality when I show a work
like this," says Lee, pointing to the portrait of a reclining
white prostitute being served by a black maid. "Gender analysis
is accepted as a perfectly viable form of interpretation, and
it's also not assumed to be the only form. Students will also
see an opportunity for race and class analysis here. They give
me a tremendous amount of room to analyze modernist works as not
a closed story but one that is always being rethought."
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Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Anthony
Lee
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For Lee, rethinking
modernist works means approaching them as historical representations
that express the values of particular cultures, visual things
that have a relationship with "such seemingly unaesthetic
concerns as radical politics, immigrant societies, and organized
labor." Lee's most recently published book, Picturing
Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (University
of California Press, 2001), explores just such "unaesthetic"
concerns—namely the economic, political, and social needs,
fears, and desires of those who observed and depicted the Chinese
community in San Francisco from about 1840 to 1950.
When Chinatown first
developed, "few were willing to accept the possibility that
the Chinese would actually stay," writes Lee. "Chinatown's
value lay in its being possessed at some future date." The
earliest photographs, created during the 1860s, reflect that perspective,
capturing the land and buildings of the quarter, not its Chinese
immigrants. Photographers presented the quarter as if for a government
survey, focusing on the arrangement of streets, the dimensions
of buildings, and the topography of the landscape.
By the end of the
century, San Franciscans could no longer ignore the permanence
of the Chinese in San Francisco. They needed good relations with
Chinese officials, who were important for profitable trade agreements
and, at the same time, desired tight control over Chinatown's
laborers, who (despite harsh legislation intended to control and
silence them) were becoming increasingly vocal about economic
and political reform in the United States and China. To achieve
both ends, outsiders insisted on assigning qualitative differences
among the Chinese, attributing all laudable traits to members
of the merchant classes, all wickedness to the laborers. Photos
of the day reinforced these stereotypes, says Lee, pointing to
works by avant-garde photographer Arnold Genthe: "His many
pictures of lavishly dressed Chinese women and children were almost
always separated from his pictures of Chinese working men, as
if the two groups could not possibly be conceived together when
he went in search of the ‘right' image. He even cropped them
for publication when reality happened to intrude."
Artists who depicted
a more insightful, less stereotypical Chinese population didn't
fare very well. Lee points to early-twentieth-century journalist
and photographer Louis Stellman, whose pictures and writings presented
a positive picture of Chinatown's laborers and activists as valuable,
ethical businessmen who could help rebuild San Francisco, which
had been devastated by earthquake and fire. Publishers rejected
Stellman's images, writes Lee, their audience preferring the non-Western
Chinatown pictured by Genthe, "a Chinatown following Qing
manners, where the Chinese were required to wear queues as a sign
of obedience to authority, where Confucianism guided daily behavior
and family decorum, where dynastic rule brought visually silken
forms of worship and pageantry, and where benevolent associations
spoke on behalf of the otherwise silent masses."
Genthe and publishers
were not alone in stereotyping Chinatown's residents and distancing
them from American culture and citizenship. Underground Chinatown,
an exhibition organized (without Chinese input) for the "Joy
Zone" amusement section of the 1915 Panama Pacific International
Exposition, presented another overly simplistic picture of the
quarter. Inside the "hovel-like settings" of this popular
exhibition, Lee writes, "the visitor met with shrieking hatchet
men, bleary-eyed addicts, bookmakers with singsong voices, and,
most popular of all, prostitutes ‘imported' from China who
called to customers from behind prison bars."
From the work of San
Francisco artists and experiments by the Chinese Revolutionary
Artists' Club, to commercial representations for tourists and
dance productions at San Francisco's risqué "Forbidden
City" nightclub, Lee shows a consistent pattern of "Orientalizing"
Chinatown, a pattern that Edward Said described as a way of "dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over" the place. Lee
challenges us to look "in the fissures, emphases, ellipses,
and obsessions" of those images to see glimpses of the true
lives of Chinatown's residents.
On October 16, Lee
will present the lecture "Orientals and Orientalists in the
American Scene" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which
recently named him fourteenth winner of the annual Charles C.
Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art.
The prize, sponsored by the patrons' support organization American
Art Forum, recognizes Picturing Chinatown as an "outstanding
study of the visual, social, and political culture of San Francisco's
Chinatown."
The author of a previous
book about San Francisco's art and culture, Painting on the
Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public
Murals (University of California, 1999), Lee is currently
studying images a little closer to home: nineteenth-century Chinese
shoemakers in North Adams, Massachusetts, who posed for hundreds
of photos long before photos held the sentimental or historical
value we know today. "Was this the moment when the need for
visualizing identity began to take shape?" Lee asks. His
inquiry is supported by a Millicent C. McIntosh Fellowship, granted
by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for recently
tenured faculty in the humanities. Lee is also studying three
hundred unpublished photographs by Diane Arbus for a book and
traveling exhibition scheduled to open at Mount Holyoke's art
museum in fall 2003. Students will get a preview of both projects
this coming spring in Lee's new course, History of Photography,
in which he surveys the rise and development of photography in
the United States, Mexico, and Europe.
The
counter is
10,237
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