2 ACUMEN • SPRING 2024 “About 15 years ago, when in the middle of a drawing, I was plagued by all the noise in my head and started to write things down—perhaps to purge them, perhaps to sort them out. But instead of recording this in my journal, I started writing in the drawings. I found the tangle of my hair a perfect place to hide my thoughts—hidden in plain sight, so to speak. From that point on, most of my drawings, prints and sometimes even my sculpture contained text, sometimes recorded, sometimes stenciled, sometimes handwritten and sometimes printed and debossed into the paper,” she says. “The text varies. It’s mostly personal, sometimes literary, always political and deals with all those issues we battle with every day.” Reading Between the Lines includes a room of Gans’ printmaking “outtakes” that gives visitors a view into her creative process. Viewers see how many attempts she undertook before creating the final print. She says she uses variations to come to a finished work, but once it is finished, it is finished. Understanding this process is hopefully a point from which discussions with students and colleagues can take place, she adds. “It was wonderful seeing the students at the opening, listening and then really taking a close look at my work. I think it’s important to have faculty ART READING BETWEEN THE LINES Reading Between the Lines, a solo exhibition by artist Lucy Gans, opened Aug. 29 in Lehigh University Art Galleries (LUAG). Both a self-reflective retrospective and an exploration of social issues, this exhibition has been a long time in the making and includes work in sculpture, drawing and printmaking from 1999 to 2023, with a concentration on more recent prints that combine image and text. Gans’ work gives voice to family narratives and stories of relationships that can include abuse, social violence and abandonment, through the layering of text and image. Her exhibition features curated works representing her figurative interpretations of the world around her. “I think the In Our Own Words (show) pushed me,” says Gans, professor of art and Louis and Jane P. Weinstock ’36 Chair, about her previous exhibition. “A lot of work had its origins in that piece. I think those interviews that I conducted with those women changed a lot about how I think about what I do in my work and also what is possible to do in work. shows, as the students can see that we’re not just talking about it, we are making the work, too. But, it also sets up some lovely faculty conversations between faculty of different disciplines. We’re a pretty diverse department in terms of what we do and how we approach our work,” she says. MODERN LANGUAGES & LITERATURES MEDICINE AND HEALING Scholars who study Chinese medicine frequently rely on canons dating back to China’s medieval period, a time spanning from the third through the 14th centuries. A new perspective is offered in the latest book by scholar Constance Cook. She argues that recently discovered manuscripts show multiple lines of transmission for medical knowledge and that the canons, the product of multiple editors over time, reflect just one strand in the evolution of Chinese medicine. In her book, Medicine and Healing in Ancient East Asia: A View from Excavated Texts, Cook examines the development of healing strategies in ancient texts, the earliest of which were written on bone. Later texts were inscribed on bamboo, silk and paper. Prior to the medieval period, these texts were not collated into canons. “What I’m showing is we have all these texts that came out of the ground that are actually written at the time period, and they show a different story,” says Cook, professor and chair of the department of modern languages and literatures. “I’m comparing the two different stories, the transmitted story with the untransmitted story, and I’m emphasizing the untransmitted story, which has never been done before. I’m showing where they converge and where they don’t converge.” Two general approaches to healing include the ancient magical medicine and the later cosmic medicine. The former linked illness to demonic influences and the latter to different COURTESY OF LUCY GANS THE HBURMIEAFNSITIES
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