Touring Jackson's Garden, Nixi Cura points to a secluded, grassy area where students will build a Chinese garden next spring.
Students will plan the garden by using design software, and the garden will remain for others to visit and study or meditate in. Students in the following year's seminar will take the garden down and recreate it from scratch-“a way of simulating the ephemerality of Chinese gardens,” Cura says.
Cura, an art historian who has edited two electronic art history journals, came to Union this fall from SMU, thanks to the Freeman Foundation grant. Unlike most art historians today, she teaches and lectures in digital format. Referring to a fourth-century scroll, she says, “It's about twelve feet long and one foot wide, and I had to figure out how to show this long, narrow piece with very small figures on it. With digital imagery, I could zoom in, reconstruct and see details, such as collectors' seals, more accurately than with the naked eye.”
While working on her Ph.D. at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, Cura discovered a fascination with the military. “This coincided with my study of eighteenth-century China, when the Manchu rulers commanded a military machine. I learned Manchu because I wanted to read Qing (1644-1911) documents. It was a security language, which means that all important documents (such as those on the 17th-century rebuilding of the Forbidden City) were written in Manchu, and thus little studied.”
Cura is interested equally in art and its context-when and how the object was made, how it was received, and how its symbolism and significance changed over time. “What does it mean to build a huge, useless structure like the Great Wall? It didn't keep out the Mongols. And what does it mean today? It really has to do with what each culture brings to it.”
In her Monuments and Monumentality course this term, students consider assumptions about what constitutes a monument-for the Chinese and for us. “This is relevant to the World Trade Center, which meant one thing to New Yorkers, another to all Americans, and yet another to al Qaeda. The towers didn't have that status when they were first built.”