Judith T. Zeitlin, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, University of Chicago

This talk builds on recent scholarship that takes seriously fantasmatic portrayals of transmutation in Chinese porcelain manufacture. The speaker argues that creative accounts—theatrical and narrative, Chinese and European—position porcelain as a substance hovering on the cusp between life and death, person and thing, animate and inanimate. To do so, she will take you through Chinese materials as diverse as a Ming court opera about the eunuch admiral Zheng He, strange cases of statues that haunt, hagiographies of self-sacrificing artisans who immolate themselves in the kiln, and a stop-motion animation film comprised entirely of porcelain by contemporary artist Geng Xue. The catalyst for the project is the recent performance in New York and Chicago of an 18th century French pantomime-ballet about an evil sorcerer who transforms people into porcelain. This brilliant new production, co-created by art historian Meredith Martin and the choreographer and Asian American activist Phil Chan, reimagines a work from the height of the European chinoiserie craze in a way that both captures the magic of porcelain and addresses current politics of race in the arts for a 21st century audience.