Art History

This course examines visual art spanning from the early modern period to the contemporary. It covers a range of art practices situated within a global context, along with art works produced in Māori and Pacific cultures alongside Indian, Asian, Middle Eastern, European and American traditions.

This course presents a thematic overview of the global intersections and relationships of Western visual and material culture across a range of historically located examples. Topics are explored in this course under the broad themes of appropriations and the "other" and cultural geographies. Through these lenses students explore topics as diverse as orientalism, photography and colonialism, and globalization and contemporary art, and what they reveal about cultural transmission through the ages.

This course considers objects and places from the medieval world that have accumulated multiple meanings over time. Challenging the narrative of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and Christianity, it focuses on the entangled histories of art and architecture in the medieval Mediterranean, examining through case studies the mediatory role of art, material culture, and architecture from the 10th to 15th centuries. 

This course examines the history of Daoist art from its pre-Daoist origin to its popularization in Late Imperial period. Students will be introduced to the visual and iconographic features of the Daoist pantheon and the rich material culture associated with Daoist rituals. Emphasis is also placed on considering Daoist art’s cultural and political contexts.

Prompted by decolonization, postcolonialism, globalization, and the globalized contemporary art world of the present day, many have suggested that narratives of modern art focused on Western cities such as Paris and New York are now provincial or inadequate. This course examines the rise of early- to mid-20th century "modern" art in a range of countries not usually considered in Western survey courses. With the 1900-1960 date range setting its boundaries, the course involves both close examinations of individual works by key figures, and broad comparative examination of movements and styles across times and places. As well as introducing students to some of the figures and movements that have been taken to show the distinctive nature of modernisms around the world, it asks broader theoretical questions about the status of art history and the study of modernism.

This course examines city and representation in Asia. Our period focus is the uneven context of modernization. The course will roughly cover developments beginning in the 1850s through the 1970s (and today). Topics discussed will include geography, landscape, and the inscription and uses of historical memory (The Past City); modernism and the rise of urban culture in the twentieth century (The Modernist City); urban forms in the age of imperialism (The Colonial City); and developmentalism and its critique in the post-war/post-independence periods (The City of the Future). it concludes with an exploration of diasporic formations, including in Vancouver—The Diasporic City.

This course examines the history of imperial and colonial archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the ways in which archaeological extraction often went hand-in-hand with the European and North American imperial or colonial ventures. It covers the artefacts that arrived in museums as a result of these ventures and what that says about our current “encyclopedic” style of museum that purports to share knowledge of the world yet is also a testament to western intervention in Indigenous societies at home and in other parts of the world. 

This course navigates across European art movements, highlighting an intensive exchange and collaboration between German and Russian artistic and intellectual circles involved in the radical avant-garde practices after the First World War and the October Revolution (1917-1930). Covering debates on the artistic strategies of intervention in society, politics, everyday life, mass media, and urban planning, each session focuses on a theoretical response to a specific problem and a case study of artistic practices across various media and forms, including fine art, architecture, cinema, literature, and theatre.

This course examines various arts and themes from a region now called Asia, from the past to the present. Rather than providing a chronological or regional survey, it is designed to introduce students to the similarities and differences among cultures, their histories, and the skills needed to critically analyze visual materials from these regions. The primary focus will be on China, allowing students to utilize external resources such as museums and art galleries in Hong Kong. The course aims to highlight key ideas and themes in Asian art history, including how these concepts are transmitted, adapted, and transformed across different regions. Students will gain insights into fundamental aspects of Asian art, such as Buddhism, the Confucian code of authority, the significance of ink and brush painting, and contemporary art discussions that have global impact. 

This is the second part of a two-semester course covering the period from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It focuses on the arts of the Classicism. Rather than the global and idealizing point of view, often confining to the "family novel" of the great heroic artists, it places greater emphasis on a whole series of problems, artistic and inartistic, considered as sensitive questions: problems of space, place of Antiquity, religious devotion, funerary practices, political images, mannerisms and bodily movements, and mannerism and technique. In other words, a history of forms and styles allows a deeper questioning of the profound inventiveness of the visual productions of the Renaissance and the Baroque age.