Euromodernism’s ‘Chinese Eyes’: Orientalism and Formal Immediacy
European modernism often imagined aesthetic form as a way to overcome mediation: to make alienated experience, fragmented sociality, or absent truth appear immediately whole or present. At the same time, Edward Said identifies one of the core mechanisms of imperial representation as how it effaces its own mediation of the Orient, as if representation delivered “presence” rather than “re-presence.” This panel explores to what extent the modernist fantasy of formal immediacy was historically enabled by a fantasy of immediacy built into Orientalist representation.
