The East Asian Art & Archival collection’s website was created by Samantha Smith, Class of 2020, as part of her capstone project for the College of East Asian Studies major. During her capstone, Samantha worked with Wendi Field Murray, Wesleyan’s Collections Manager, to increase the accessibility and discoverability of Wesleyan’s East Asian Art & Archival Collection.
Samantha was not aware of Wesleyan’s East Asian Art & Archival Collection until the end of fall semester during her senior year. In fact, she only discovered the collection because one of her courses, Literature and Media in China: From Inscriptions to Print Culture to New Media, had two days built into the syllabus to visit the collection. During these class visits, students had the opportunity to work directly with examples of materials they had read about in a hands-on environment.
One of Samantha’s favorite memories working with the collections during class was reading pages from the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. Not only was this experience a great capstone for the class in the sense that she got to apply the material covered in the readings to actual media materials, but it was also a great capstone to her Wesleyan language experience. During Chinese class, students read various news articles and blog posts of current events in China; however, for Samantha, it was a rewarding experience to read a prominent text which was originally written in the 17th century and understand the message the author intended to convey.
After this experience, Samantha wanted to continue working with the collection and wished she would have known about it earlier in her Wesleyan career. As a result, she proposed a nonconventional capstone project. For her capstone, Samantha wanted to focus on two distinct aspects of the collection: the first was collections care and management, and the second was collections interpretation, outreach, and discoverability so that, hopefully, future students would not have to wait until their senior year to learn about this amazing resource.
During the course of the capstone, Samantha learned best practices for handling objects, collections housekeeping, and updated the format for the current collection’s records system. Even though the initial tasks were tedious, they gave Samantha an appreciation for all of the work that goes on behind the scenes that allows Wesleyan to have and maintain such an diverse collection.
By the end of the capstone project, Samantha catalogued and researched over 50 objects form China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and India. Additionally, Samantha translated and rehoused Wesleyan’s collection of Chinese Cultural Revolution propaganda posters and translated a series of Chinese New Year’s Prints. Each of the objects Samantha worked with during her capstone project are all visible on the website.
