What secrets and stories of the past does Shanghai have written down for its attentive readers? What handwriting practices survive in the city which seemingly turns towards digital writing? Chinese script is known to accompany paintings, but in fact it tends to accompany in different forms many human creations, serving a number of purposes from informative to magical or decorative. This richly illustrated talk forms an attempt to look more closely at the fascinating connection between the city and writing practices, shaping its look, identity and daily life inside the lanes. It is a celebration of Shanghai urban space maintaining multilayered traces of various hopes and experiences, both in messages provided by the authorities and bottom-up expression of anonymous inhabitants. It is a combination of a broader overview of endangered urban writing practices in Shanghai and more thorough analysis of few of them, to provide insights and inspiration for those bound to Chinese script by passion and creative work.
Karolina Pawlik is an anthropologist, art historian and a poet, who is currently Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California’s and Jiaotong University’s joint Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry. She has been based in Shanghai since 2012, teaching at L’école de design Nantes-Atlantique, Jiaotong University, the ESSCA School of Management, and L’école de Communication Visuelle. Main areas of research and interest include: visual modernism in Shanghai, evolution of writing practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, and transcultural design. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Silesia.
Event detail:
Where: Glam, No.5 The Bund (corner of Guangdong Lu) 广东路20号（外滩5号）7楼
When: 15 Dec 2018 – 4 pm
Tickets: 100 RMB/50 RMB
We use Yoopay as our ticketing service, please turn off your VPN if you do not see the ticketing widget below:
