- World Views: Spatial Imagination in East Asia

Catalog description

This course engages the question: ‘How are images used to imagine our place in the world?’ Students are invited to study fascinating practices of spatial image-making in East Asia from the inside out, by exploring these world-views from the perspective of their makers. You will be asked to pay special attention to how social and economic power structures inflect these representations: to envision and decode spatial imagery as a site of imagination, control, and resistance. Artists and patrons in China, Japan, and Korea have for centuries produced elaborate maps and landscape imagery, photographs, and film to imagine the world in a variety of ways. This course invites you to approach modern and contemporary representations of space in East Asia both in theoretically and historically informed ways. In the first part of the course, students build a frame of reference for their analysis of post-war case studies, by reading core texts in spatial theory and exploring important visual representations of space from pre-modern East Asia. In the second part of the course, students apply these theoretical and historical approaches to select cases that exemplify more recent struggles over space and its imagination in East Asia.