Cerebral, multidisciplinary, and masterfully dilettantish, Marcel Duchamp shares much with the artists of the Chinese tradition––the literati. But Duchamp was born into the last stages of the Qing empire, emerged in New York at the founding of the revolutionary Chinese Republic, and enjoyed his mature reception after the revolutionary founding of the People’s Republic. By the time he died, at the start of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, the literati tradition in China was fully rejected by a society that was “smashing the old.” The sundering of the global capitalist and socialist art worlds during the Cold War further suppressed the appreciation for his art in China. But what if Duchamp had enjoyed a reception in China despite its great revolutionary advancements? How would literati artists have assessed this enigmatic Western artist? 

Is it thus with great excitement that we announce the discovery of an anonymous Chinese text on Duchamp, recently found among the papers of an old book collector whose bookshop had been bulldozed to make way for a cultural preservation project. The unnamed author of the text appears to have styled himself as a remnant subject of the last empire, or at least, a reluctant citizen of the new world. The text––if it is not spurious!––appears to take the form of a classical biographical entry, likely intended for one of many Chinese encyclopedias that was never completed. In this talk, the text will be delivered in English translation, with relevant visual annotations for the modern reader. 

Winnie Wong teaches undergraduate courses on Rhetorical Interpretation, Art and Authorship, Visual Rhetoric, Rhetoric of Performance, and Rhetorical Places, and graduate courses in the Rhetoric of the Image at the University of California, Berkeley. Topics she has taught include “Theory of the Copy,” “China in the Western Imagination,” and “The Factory (Before Marx and After Warhol).” In the Spring of 2015, she co-taught with Margaret Crawford the Global Urban Humanities research studio documented on this website: Art+Village+City in the Pearl River Delta. Work from the studio was exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale 2015 and at Wurster Hall on Berkeley campus. Prior to joining the Rhetoric department, she did her postdoctoral work as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and obtained her PhD from the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT.