This January, a dozen Columbia College Chicago arts and media students will be earning three credit hours in Humanities in a cultural adventure in Shanghai. The course, History, Culture and Art of Shanghai, will immerse students in the history and contemporary culture of the one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.
According to the New York Times (October 15) Shanghai is “China’s showcase city … banking on long-term, hyper-growth.” For students of arts and culture, Shanghai is much more than the latest hot tourist destination. The metropolis offers a rich architectural history that reflects the city’s relationship to foreign powers and world culture. In addition to history and architecture, Columbia students will visit universities and museum for an overview of art history and will connect with the contemporary arts scene, artists and galleries through BizArt, a not-for-profit arts center and organization dedicated to furthering contemporary arts in Shanghai. This course represents BizArt’s first partnership with a U.S. college and this collaboration will provide students with an insider’s access to Shanghai’s contemporary arts scene.
The students, most of whom have never been out of the Midwest, will engage in several days of intense preparatory coursework in Chicago before leaving for Shanghai. While in China, the photography, art & design, film & video, fiction writing, radio and cultural studies majors will participate in daily activities and document their experience through journal both an academic and artistic journal. They will then develop a capstone project within their area of creative expression. The artistic work produced during the course trip will be mounted in a gallery exhibition during the college’s spring term.
The “J-Term” course [a short-term intensive offered during semester break] was developed by Dr. Elena Valussi in collaboration with the college's department of liberal education. Valussi, who teaches Eastern Humanities at Columbia, lived in Shanghai for a year while doing research on her dissertation. While there her strong interest in art led her to develop a relationship with BizArt. “Columbia students are interested in the same areas of creative expression that BizArt is trying to promote – video art, multi-media installations that incorporate elements of performing art with visual art,” Valussi explains. “I realized that a connection between Columbia and BizArt would be an ideal cultural and educational exchange and I proposed the humanities course for our J-Term intensive.”
The course will be co-taught by Natasha Egan, associate director of Columbia’s Museum of Contemporary Photography and curator of the museum’s recent Made in China exhibition. Egan, who spent a year as an undergraduate studying in Southeast Asia, also teaches the Senior Thesis capstone course for the Photography Department’s BFA program.
Elena Valussi teaches part time in the liberal education department of Columbia while continuing her research and writing on the history, religion and culture of East Asia. With a particular focus on the interplay of East Asian and Chinese religions, medicine and gender, Valussi has presented at conferences in Germany, Italy, England, the Netherlands and the United States and spent more than four years, on and off, studying in China, including two years doing fieldwork in Daoist temples. She is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Daoism (Curzon Press, 2005) and the forthcoming Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard University Press). Valussi earned her undergraduate degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Venice, Italy. She holds a Master’s Degree in Religious Studies and a Ph.D. from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies where she wrote her dissertation on “Beheading the Red Dragon: A History of Female Inner Alchemy in China”
Natasha Egan is associate director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago. Aside from the administrative duties, Egan serves as a member of the curatorial team and has organized over a dozen international and national single artist exhibitions such as Katarzyna Kozyra, Anne and Bernard Blume, Sophie Calle, Anna Fox, Oliver Boberg, Nikki S. Lee, Zwelethu Mthethwa, and Seydou Keïta. Her larger thematic exhibitions and essays have included Alienation and Assimilation: Contemporary Images and Installations from the Republic of Korea; Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: The Transportation of Place; Consuming Nature, focusing on the relationship between man and nature; Manufactured Self, how we identify ourselves through what we consume, and Made in China, focusing on the global impact of manufacturing in China. Egan has contributed essays to such publications as Shimon Attie: The History of Another, Descry: Antonia Contro and Maurizio Pellegrin, and Contemporary Magazine’s special issue on photography with an essay titled Photography Plugged and Unplugged. Natasha has taught in the photography department at Columbia College Chicago since 1997 and juries local and national exhibitions. She holds an MA in museum studies and an MFA in fine art photography from Columbia College Chicago as well as a BA in Asian Studies from the University of Puget Sound. As an undergraduate, Egan participated in the Study-Travel program spending nine month in Southeast Asia. Her undergraduate thesis compared the role of Buddhism in the politics of Vietnam and Thailand.
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