Faculty, Student, and Alumni News

Please join the entire Asian Studies Center staff, faculty, students, and community in welcoming Linda Lieu to her new position as Assistant Director for Partnerships & Programming.

Linda was formally the Assistant Registrar for Student Records and Graduation for the University of Pittsburgh’s Registrar’s Office. Prior to working at the University of Pittsburgh Linda spent many years in community engagement roles at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. She has presented on topics such as sexual assault, the Model Minority Myth, Pitt’s PeopleSoft student information system and conducted programs in the Allegheny County Jail. She is currently co-chair of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Caucus through the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO). 

As ASC’s Assistant Director for Partnerships & Programming, she will be responsible for most of the great programming held by the center. Additionally, she will oversee partnerships with community organizations. Welcome Linda!
 

On Saturday, November 5th, with help from the Asian Studies Center, Screenshot: Asia, and Pitt Professor Seung-Hwan Shin, The Crossroads of Youth Byeonsa Performance US Tour visited the University of Pittsburgh, bringing its troupe from South Korea to the United States for a multi-city tour in Fall, 2022. The byeonsa troupe presented Crossroads of Youth (Cheongchunui sipjaro, Ahn Jong-hwa, 1934), Korea’s oldest surviving silent film, with live storytelling, music, and acting in accompaniment. The troupe reimagined and reconstructed byeonsa culture, Korea’s unique film watching tradition from the colonial period. The performance was held in the Alumni Hall Auditorium alongside food and period attire.
Byeonsa refers to film narrator. Byeonsa performance was a mode of movie watching popular in colonial Korea. This tradition was unique to the film culture of East Asia at its early stage. As opposed to the intertitles common in Western silent film, byeonsa performance would usually include both description of events and verbalization of characters’ voices. It came to Korea via Japan—benshi—during the colonial period and Korea developed its own style of film narration with its distinctive stylistic flourishes. Byeonsas were highly trained and highly respected artists and allegedly, some of them enjoyed greater celebrity than famous actors.
 

Keisuke Yamada, (PhD University of Pennsylvania, 2020) is an ethnomusicologist who studies Japanese cultural formations.  As a Japanese Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh he will be affiliated with the Asian Studies Center in the University Center for International Studies from Spring 2021 through Spring 2022.  Dr. Yamada’s scholarship is interdisciplinary, ranging across a number of topics to engage with theoretical questions that highlight the significance of a global perspective in Asian studies.  His first book Supercell's Supercell featuring Hatsune Miku (Bloomsbury 2017), examined the fan-based articulation of vocaloid musical personae and the blurring of production and consumption in the domain of prosumer social media.  His dissertation research focused on the politics of cultural creativity at the intersection of traditional music, environmentalism, and human/non-human animal relationships, showing how the use of animal parts and products to make shamisen (an iconic  instrument in Japan) raises complex questions concerning ethics, aesthetics, authenticity and the integrity of musical traditions, as well as the politics of sustainability and cultural preservation in an era of global environmental activism.  Following on a critically incisive study of blackness and racial stereotypes in the intellectual history of Japan’s engagement the west, his current research examines the history of noise (sō-on), making the argument that the creative potential of noise must be understood as a feature of work environments and the history of labor in the context of industrialized production. 
While at the University of Pittsburgh Dr. Yamada will complete work on several publications, pursue his ongoing research, play a critical role in the expansion of the Summer Institute for Asian Studies, and in fall 2021 will co-teach Asia Now, an undergraduate course that incorporates a lecture series to highlight contemporary scholarship in Asian Studies.

The University of Pittsburgh Library System, which holds the largest collection of artist Tsukioka Kōgyo’s (1869-1927) color woodblock prints outside of Japan, has digitized four complete sets that depict Noh theatre. This online collection comprises the largest digital representation of Kōgyo’s work freely available online. The set contains: Nōgaku zue 能樂圖繪 (Pictures of  Noh), Nōgaku hyakuban 能楽百番 (Prints of One Hundred Noh Plays), Nōga taikan 能画大鑑 (A Great Collection of Prints of Noh Plays), and Kyōgen gojūban 狂言五十番 (Fifty Kyōgen Plays) and is available via the Kōgyo: The Art of Noh website at: http://exhibit.library.pitt.edu/kogyo/

The Artist

As the preeminent graphic artist of the Noh and kyōgen theatres, Tsukioka Kōgyo created hundreds of Japanese woodblock prints, paintings, magazine illustrations, and postcard pictures of Noh and kyōgen plays. Kōgyo also produced paintings and prints of flowers, birds, and even wartime scenes, but he is best known and remembered for his theatre paintings and prints. All the prints were published in Tokyo between 1897 and 1930.

Noh Theatre

Noh theatre, a well-known and long-established art form that originated in 14^th century Japan, is a combination of dance and drama that plays on themes of the supernatural and the natural world.

The Collection

The online collection contains 632 digitized prints from the four sets, along with over 200 Japanese synopses of Noh plays with English summaries provided by P.G. O’Neill in his A Guide to Nō (Hinoki Shoten, 1964).

As described by Elizabeth Oyler, professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, “Kōgyo is recognized as a master whose art imbued traditional woodblock printing with the new techniques and perspectives of the global modernity of the turn of the 20th century.  His four collections of Noh prints embrace the breadth of his artistic vision and provide invaluable documentation of the world of the Noh theatre.  Access to a carefully catalogued and cross-referenced digital archive containing all four collections is a treasure trove for scholars of studio arts, art history, the Noh and theatre history, and world history.”