By: Dr. April Liu (Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow (Asia) at the Museum of Anthropology)
About The Event
“Even though the archive and the repertoire exist in a constant state of interaction, the tendency has been to banish the repertoire to the past.” – Diana Taylor
As the “king of beasts,” the white tiger is widely known across South China as a ferocious spirit to be ritually worshipped for its apotropaic powers of warding off evil, danger, or disease. This study analyzes a set of early 20th century objects connected to popular white tiger lore and ritual worship, including opera costumes, woodblock prints, and paper ephemera. Most of these objects were produced in Guangdong and are now stored at the UBC Museum of Anthropology. As museum “artefacts,” they have been labeled and sorted by geographic region and medium rather than studied as a group of objects tied to a shared ritual context. Stored away in the vaults of the museum, the objects are also physically isolated from the communities who would recognize their value and connections to contemporary white tiger worship.
As performance theorist Diana Taylor put it, the so-called tangible “archive” is preserved, but the ephemeral “repertoire” of embodied knowledge is “banished” or marginalized from view. To critique this institutionalized rift between objects and practices, I will reconstruct the ritual histories of these objects and reconnect them to various forms of contemporary white tiger worship, a vibrant realm of activity that is witnessing a stunning resurgence of interest in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
About the Speaker
April Liu is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow for Asia at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, Canada. She completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia in 2012, specializing in Chinese art history. Her current research interests include Chinese print culture, Cantonese opera, contemporary Asian art and visual cultures, and critical heritage studies.
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