The Life and Work of John Bradby Blake - Unspoken Questions

The Life and Work of John Bradby Blake (1745-1773)

Rediscovering an Early European Encounter with the Plants of China

[To see details of this particular talk please scroll down to the bottom beyond the listings and the 2nd pic]

John Bradby Blake’s life was short but exceptional. During a span of only three years in the southern Chinese port city of Canton, Blake and his Chinese artist(s) produced several hundred exquisite, botanically accurate, coloured drawings of Chinese plants, many of which were unknown in the West. Hidden from public view for more than two centuries, these singular and historically crucial collaborative artistic creations have only recently resurfaced.

This series of six illustrated talks, focussing on the botanical drawings, will lead you into a previously unknown world in London and Canton, which Blake participated in and shaped. It will explore the many meanings of the material results of a rich and unique cross-cultural encounter which continued to reverberate for decades after his death.

Our speakers, who have worked closely together on the Blake drawings and associated, scattered manuscripts and texts (in Chinese and western languages), are experts in the fields of botany, art history, garden history and the history of science; and they come to you from the United Kingdom, the United States and Taiwan.

This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase a ticket for other individual sessions, costing £5 via the links below (where you may also read more information on the individual talks), or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 6 sessions at a cost of £24 via the link here.

Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.

…..

Week 1: 7 February: An Englishman Abroad. Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

Week 2: 14 February: From London to Canton and Back. Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

Week 3: 21 February: The Chinese Flora. Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

Week 4: 28 February: Unspoken Questions. Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

Week 5: 7 March: Blake and the Chinese Court. Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

Week 6: 14 March: Panel Discussion. Part of a series of 6 online lectures, £5 each or all 6 for £24.

.....

Week 4. 28 February: "Is Not This?" Unspoken Questions and the Pleasures of Substitution with Professor Winnie Wong, University of California, Berkeley, USA

In the mid-18th century, the city of Guangzhou (Canton), became the sole port of trade through which the Chinese plant commodity, tea, passed to Europe. The quest for the tea plant, as a living or dried specimen, as a product of knowledge or of manufacture, as an illustration or painting, lay at the heart of European natural history projects in Canton, and especially Linnaeus' project of plant substitution. In this context the city and its inhabitants flowered into a multiplicity of plants, plant names, ways to represent them, and commodities that they represented. This paper examines several instructional moments in which Chinese and European merchants and naturalists asked questions of Canton's painters, apothecaries, herbalists, gardeners, street sellers, shopkeepers, and books. While they never seemed to get a proper answer, this paper interrogates their questions: why they were asked, and why they were so often unspoken and unrecorded.

Winnie Wong is a historian of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, frauds, copies, counterfeits, and other non-art challenges to authorship and originality. Her research is based in the southern Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. She is the author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (Joseph Levenson Book Prize, 2015). She received her PhD in History, Theory, and Criticism from MIT, was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and is currently Associate Professor in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Images: © Oak Spring Garden Foundation

Event Venue

Online