Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world?

Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shengqing Wu is professor of Chinese literature at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is the author of Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900–1937(2013).

中國詩詞與視覺藝術之間互動的歷史悠久。古典美學思想認為，繪畫、書法和詩詞是相互融合及豐富彼此的存在。而攝影則是一種變革性的技術，現實的媒介，更重塑了人們的視線和反映著世界。那麼當中國傳統詩詞遇上攝影時，又會發生了什麼事？

吳盛青探索了攝影的新媒介如何被中國美學文化改造，她詳細介紹了清末民國時期詩詞與攝影之間的複雜談判，探討了傳統文本形式與新視覺文化的協作方式。《Photo Poetics》一書利用對影像雜誌、詩歌集和古典原照的廣泛研究，分析不同的實踐和體裁，包括人像攝影中的自我表現、照片加上題字作禮、媒體塑造的女性形象美；以及鬼魂、神仙和虛幻風景的攝影。吳認為，面對日益發達的技術和形象主導的社會，中國抒情詩調的傳統為藝術創作、自我表達和體現經驗提供了豐富的資源。《Photo Poetics》是跨學科研究，涵蓋文學研究、視覺文化和媒體歷史，是二十世紀初中國媒體文化和中國文學與視覺現代性形成的原始記錄。

關於作者：

Shengqing Wu （吳盛青），香港科技大學人文學部中國文學副教授，曾任美國威爾斯利學院副教授、哈佛大學費正清中國研究中心An Wang博士後研究員、哈佛燕京學社訪問學者。首本著作 Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition 1900-1937（哈佛大學出版社，2013年）闡述了現代文學與古典文學的相互轉化性。