Yechen Zhao | Cowboy Orientalism: Deng Xiaoping and Garry Winogrand at the Rodeo

This talk looks at photographs of People's Republic of China leader Deng Xiaoping in a cowboy hat (taken in Simonton, Texas during his 1979 visit to the United States) and examines how the cowboy was a figure through which American and Chinese diplomatic goals were made mutually intelligible. The preconditions for this intelligibility are found in Garry Winogrand's photographs of the Fort Worth rodeo, the "remasculinization" of post-Vietnam America, and negotiations between the United States and China leading up to the normalization of diplomatic relations in late 1978. Beyond their relevance to 1970s American photography, the pictures of Deng in a cowboy hat are artifacts of a trans-Pacific contestation over masculinity, national pride, as well as economic and political strategy.

About the Speaker

Yechen Zhao received his PhD in art history from Stanford University in 2022. His writing has appeared in History of Photography and is forthcoming in Aperture. He is currently the Marcia Brady Tucker Fellow in Photography at the Yale University Art Gallery and a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art. He is the incoming Assistant Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago.

About the Series

Research Workshop in Honor of John Bender

The Working Group in Literary and Visual Culture ​is made possible by support from an anonymous donor honoring the work of former SHC Director John Bender, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.