Film Screening: The Terrorizers (Kong bu fen zi)
2024-04-08 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Characterized as “Yang’s most difficult, intellectually provocative, and structurally challenging film” (John Anderson), Edward Yang’s third feature-length film is a puzzle with immense reverberatory power. The Terrorizers depicts the intertwining of love and death among three different couples: a young photographer and his literary girlfriend; a middle-class and middle-aged married couple whose mutual estrangement grows to the point of no return; and a delinquent duo whose income comes from committing petty pickpocketing and blackmailing. Prank phone calls, amateur photography, writer’s block and coveted promotions serendipitously bring these separate lives together. As close relationships come to a dissolution, the distinctions between life and art, fiction and reality also edge toward implosion.

Directed by Edward Yang. With Cora Miao, Lee Li-Chun, King Shih-Chieh

Taiwan 1986, DCP, color, 110 min. Mandarin and Min Nan with English subtitles

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Dreams from China’s Past: Visions of the Future in Popular Science and Literature Magazines, 1927–1949
2024-04-09 10:30 - 11:45 | Presented via Zoom
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Speaker: Aaron William Moore, Professor of Asian Studies and Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations, University of Edinburgh

More information: https://scholar.harvard.edu/seow/STinAsia

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2024 China Town Hall Featuring Kurt Campbell and Rana Mitter
2024-04-09 18:30 - 20:00 | L-332 DELAND, Littauer Building, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
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Speakers:Kurt Campbell, Deputy U.S. Secretary of StateRana Mitter, ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations, Harvard Kennedy SchoolJoin the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the Greater China Society at HKS on April 9th for the 2024 CHINA Town Hall (CTH), a two-part program that provides a snapshot of the current U.S.-China relationship and examines how that relationship reverberates at the local level – in our towns, states, and nation, connects Americans around the country with U.S. policymakers and thought leaders on China.

The 2024 CHINA Town Hall program will take place on Tuesday, April 9, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET, with featured speaker Dr. Kurt Campbell, Deputy Secretary of State. Following the official program, students have the opportunity to discuss with Prof. Rana Mitter in-person reflecting on the event from 7:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET.

RSVP: https://forms.gle/cjDyW6LbUmfi58fV9

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Arbitrary Detention in Xinjiang: A Survivor's Story
2024-04-11 12:15 - 13:15 | WCC 1015, Wasserstein Hall, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speakers:Rayhan Asat, Uyghur Lawyer, HLS LLM ‘16Mihrigul Tursun, Uyghur Activist, Former Detainee and Camp Survivor

In 2015, Mihrigul Tursun was imprisoned in a re-education camp in Xinjiang by the Chinese authorities. Rayhan Asat’s brother, Ekpar, has been detained for right years and counting. Join Harvard Law School Advocates for Human Rights for a discussion with Tursun and Rayhan to learn more about what is happening in Xinjiang and what can be done.

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China: The Rise and Fall of the EAST - How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to its Decline
2024-04-11 17:00 - 18:30 | Building 66, 110, 25 Ames St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, United States
Speaker: Yasheng Huang, Epoch Foundation Professor of Global Economics and Management, MIT Sloan School of Management; Faculty Director, MIT-China Program, Center for International Studies.

Discussant: Will Knight, Senior Writer, Wired Magazine

More information: https://bit.ly/RiseFallChina

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Curatorial Chat: Central Asian Chronicles Echoes of the Silk Road in Manuscripts and Imagery
2024-04-12 12:00 - 13:00 | Houghton Library, Quincy Street & Harvard Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Join co-curators Dr. Gülnar Eziz, Preceptor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, and Isa Youshe, PhD Student, Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies at Harvard University, for a 30-minute guided tour of the Central Asian Chronicles: Echoes of the Silk Road in Manuscripts and Imagery exhibition currently on display in Houghton’s Amy Lowell Room. This will include discussion of the rich histories and cultural significance of the collections on display and ample time for participant questions.

Attendees should gather in Houghton’s lobby. No registration is required.

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Film Screening: That Day, on the Beach (Hai tan de yi tian)
2024-04-15 19:00 - 22:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
A renowned young pianist, Tan Ching-Ching (Terry Hu) comes back to Taipei for the first time in thirteen years to give a performance. An old friend, Lin Jia-li (Sylvia Chang), gets in touch with her to reconvene over an afternoon coffee. That Day, on the Beach takes place over a conversation between the two female friends, during which Ching learns about how the romantic and domestic life of Jia-li and her elder brother evolved over the past decade. Through complex flashbacks, the microcosmic personal life is revealed to be closely interwoven with the drastic economic and social changes that Taiwan witnessed over the entire 70s. Full of subtle narrative and cinematic surprises, the film explores the difficulties that accompany freedom, love and trust; in staging the fragility of any sense of facile contentment and hope, it makes visible the pleasure and pain entailed in one’s pursuits of happiness. The film also marks the debut of Christopher Doyle as a cinematographer, best known for his collaborations with Wong Kar-Wai. Released in Taiwan four decades ago, Edward Yang’s first feature’s length, storytelling, and formal ingenuity all speak to his unwavering will to uphold his artistic vision despite all obstacles.

Directed by Edward Yang. With Sylvia Chang, Hsu Ming, Lee Lieh

Taiwan 1983, DCP, color, 166 min. Mandarin and German with English subtitles

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Contextual Annotation in Textual and Visual Media: COMARKUS and IMMARKUS
2024-04-17 16:00 - 17:30 | CGIS South, Room S153, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Hilde De Weerdt, Professor of Chinese and Early Modern Global History, KU Leuven

Hilde De Weerdt joined the Early Modern History Research Group, KU Leuven in March 2022 as Professor of Chinese and Early Modern Global History. Professor De Weerdt is broadly interested in intellectual, social, and political history, both within an East Asian context, and within a comparative or global historical framework.

She studied Chinese and Chinese History at KU Leuven (BA) and Harvard University (PH.D.) and taught history at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (2002-2007, Assistant Professor), Oxford University (2007-2012, Associate Professor), and King’s College London (2012-2013, Reader) before becoming Chair Professor of Chinese History at Leiden University in 2013. She has published five volumes on Chinese political culture and intellectual history, focusing on the workings of late imperial Chinese bureaucratic infrastructures and political communication (Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600, ed., 2021; The Essentials of Governance, tr. and ed., 2021; Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China, 2015; Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127-1276), 2007; Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print–China, 900-1400, ed., 2011).

She is currently working on a longue-durée global history of Chinese political advice literature. In 2021 she received funding from the European Research Council and the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to extend her earlier work on Chinese state infrastructures into a large-scale collaborative project on the social and regional histories of material infrastructures (roads, bridges, city walls) (1000-1800).

She maintains an active interest in designing and developing digital research methods for East Asian and other languages. With Brent Ho she co-designed the text annotation and reading platform MARKUS, and with Mees Gelein two text comparison modules COMPARATIVUS and PARALLELLS. (On the history of and concept behind these and related digital research projects, see “Creating, Linking, and Analyzing Chinese and Korean Datasets: Digital Text Annotation in MARKUS and COMPARATIVUS”).

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2024 Harvard Visual China Graduate Symposium - Time and Temporality in Chinese Art & Culture
2024-04-19 10:30 - 17:30 | Sackler Building Auditorium, 485 Broadway, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
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How do humans and objects exist in relation to time and experience time? We often turn to space and spatial models as the dominant approach to analyzing visual materials, yet time could also serve as a way of organizing visual and perceptual experiences. In the case of Chinese art, time and temporality had particular salience as organizing principles for pictorial programs and designs. Harvard Visual China’s 2024 Graduate Symposium presents three panels on the topic of Time and Temporality in Chinese Art and Culture.

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art & Architecture and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Innovation Fund, and Harvard FAS CAMLab.

More info and registration: https://www.harvardvisualchina.com/hvc-2024-symposium-info-reg

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Film Screening: In Our Time (Guang yin de gu shi)
2024-04-22 19:00 - 21:00, 2024-05-05 15:00 - 17:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
The omnibus film In Our Time initiated radical innovations in terms of aesthetic styles, industry practices and commonly depicted themes, thereby revolutionizing the filmmaking industry in Taiwan and inaugurating the movement of Taiwan New Cinema. The four segments are shot by four young emerging directors and each film—set in different decades from the 1950s to the 1980s—represents roughly one of the four younger stages of life: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood (in college) and married life (as working professionals).

Titled Expectations, sometimes translated as Desires, Edward Yang’s segment features a series of sensitive and expressive vignettes that depict the growing pains of adolescents in mid-60s Taiwan. Yang sees the placement of the second short film as structurally akin to the second movement in a symphony, typically characterized by its lyrical and slow nature. The teenaged Hsiao-Fen (Shi An-Ni) serves as a kind of prototype for other young heroines in Yang’s cinematic corpus. The diversity of the cinematic techniques used in his debut short film accentuates the complexity of the protagonist’s emotional and perceptual experience.

Directed by Edward Yang, Chang Yi, Ko I-Chen and Tao Te-Chen. With Sylvia Chang, Emily Y. Chang, Lee Li-Chun

Taiwan 1982, DCP, color, 110 min. Mandarin and Min Nan with English subtitles

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Discovering Freshwater Jellyfish in Modern China: Arthur de Carle Soweby and Craspedacusta sowerbii, 1880–1941
2024-04-23 10:30 - 11:45 | Presented via Zoom
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Speaker: Christine Luk, Associate Professor of the History of Science, Tsinghua University

More information: https://scholar.harvard.edu/seow/STinAsia

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Michael Stanley-Baker - Evolution of A Recipe: How DocuSky’s Post-Search Classification function reveals historical change
2024-04-23 14:00 - 16:00 | CGIS South Room S250, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speaker: Michael Stanley-Baker, Nanyang Technological University

Join us for an illuminating workshop hosted by the Digital China Initiative (DCI) and the China Biographical Database Project (CBDB), showcasing the innovative DocuSky platform. Developed by the Research Center for Digital Humanities at National Taiwan University, this online platform is ingeniously designed to cater to the intricate demands of humanities scholarship. Under the expert guidance of Professor Michael Stanley-Baker from Nanyang Technological University, participants will delve into the bespoke tools and services offered by DocuSky. These include a diverse range of digital resources, analytical tools, and tailored services essential for the organization and examination of research materials.

This workshop will feature a diverse set of digital research tools designed for the historical study of Chinese medicine. At their core is the full-text corpus database hosted in DocuSky, which will be the primary focus of the presentation. We will examine the post-search classification feature, and how it allows users to parse through thousands of query returns in an exploratory way, oscillating between macro-scale data patterns, and micro-scale close reading, to come to a synthetic vision and analysis of specific research questions.

The advantage of digital tools go beyond acquiring more data. Such overviews should afford insights which prompt new questions we might not have asked before. DocuSky does more than provide answers, it stimulates new inquiry, and provides the means to explore further.

Speaker’s bio:

As an adept historian in Chinese Medicine and Religion, Professor Stanley-Baker’s expertise spans from the early Imperial period to contemporary Sinophone communities. His work intricately weaves together cultural knowledge in Chinese medicine with varied disciplines such as religion, botany, trade, modern biology, and policy. His methods range from meticulous textual analysis and interviews to cutting-edge digital humanities techniques.

Professor Stanley-Baker’s remarkable contributions to the field are evidenced by his editorial leadership in significant publications and his development of numerous digital humanities projects. His innovative creations include digital mappings of ancient Chinese medical texts and the Polyglot Medicine Knowledge Graph, a pioneering digital resource connecting traditional and modern medicinal knowledge across cultures. The project won the 2nd runner-up for Best Dataset in DH Awards 2023.

With a rich academic background that includes a PhD from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, an MA from Indiana University, and a clinical degree in Chinese medicine, Professor Stanley-Baker is a fount of knowledge. His esteemed research appointments across the globe have solidified his reputation as a leading light in the intersection of traditional knowledge and digital innovation.

If you want to participate in the workshop activities, please register for a DocuSky account at https://docusky.org.tw/DocuSky/home/?l=en

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Perspectives on Academic Freedom
2024-04-25 10:15 - 17:30 | CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium (S010), 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
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Speakers:Sugata Bose, Harvard UniversityWilliam Kirby, Harvard University Jayati Ghosh, University of Massachusetts, AmherstZeynep Kadirbeyoglu, Brandeis UniversitySidney Chalhoub, Harvard UniversityJoan Scott, Institute for Advanced Study, PrincetonDurba Mitra, Harvard UniversityBeshara Doumani, Brown UniversityBrian Connolly, University of South Florida

In 2019, alarmed by attacks on academic freedom happening simultaneously in several parts of the world (Brazil, India, Turkey, and the USA, among others), a group of faculty in the History Department decided to organize a year-long seminar series to discuss the role of academics in an age of advancing authoritarianism. The pandemic derailed our plans. The crises of the past few months have given us a new sense of urgency. How can the university remain a place of unfettered critical inquiry and expression when its mission is overtly challenged by corporate and governing interests?

Registration and a complete agenda available at: https://history.fas.harvard.edu/event/perspectives-academic-freedomOpen to members of the Harvard community only. Please bring your Harvard ID for check in.

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A Cosmos of Vital Feeling: Qing (Affect) and Qi (Breath, Atmosphere) as Critical Traditions in the Chinese Humanities, An International Conference情氣天下：重估抒情傳統與氣化論 國際研討會
2024-04-26 09:00 - 2024-04-27 17:00 | Plimpton Room (133), Barker Center, 12 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speakers:David Der-wei Wang 王德威 (Harvard University)Peter K. Bol 包弼德 (Harvard University)Wai-yee Li 李惠儀 (Harvard University)Thomas P. Kelly (Harvard University)Joo-hyeon Oh 吳周炫 (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)Yang Rur-bin 楊儒賓 (National Tsing Hua University)Cheng Yu-yu 鄭毓瑜 (National Taiwan University, Academia Sinica)Chan Kwok -Kou 陳國球 (National Tsing Hua University)Lai Shi-San 賴錫三 (National Sun Yat-sen University)Mark McConaghy 莫加南 (National Sun Yat-sen University)Lin Ming-chao 林明照 (National Taiwan University)Lin Su-chuan 林素娟 (National Cheng Kung University)Lee Yu-lin 李育霖 (Academia Sinica)Fabian Heubel 何乏筆 (Academia Sinica)Peng Hsiao-yen 彭小妍 (Academia Sinica)Paul J. D’Ambrosio 德安博 (East China Normal University)Tsai Yueh-chang 蔡岳璋 (National Tsing Hua University)Wang Wenfei 王文菲 (Harvard University)

Organizers:The Transcultural Sino-Island: The Global Sinology Forum, NSYSUCenter for the Humanities, NSYSUDepartment of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Co-Sponsors:Harvard-Yenching InstituteFairbank Center for Chinese StudiesTranscultural Sinology and Global Co-Becoming Research Group, NSYSUChiang Ching-kuo Foundation

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Film Screening: Yi Yi (A One and a Two …)
2024-05-03 19:00 - 22:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Edward Yang’s cinematic swan song, released at the turn of the millennium, is a moving tapestry that weaves together the dissolution and reconstitution of the fragile subjectivities in an increasingly global, capitalist and mediated urban society. Yi Yi opens with a wedding and ends with a funeral. What unfolds between love and death is everything that saturates our modern existence: awakening, nostalgia, contingency, anxiety, alienation, the ennui of everyday banality and the oscillations between longings for interpersonal dependence and fears of intimacy. This three-hour-long audiovisual epic unfolds the confusions and struggles of the multigenerational Jian family. As the grandmother falls into a coma, the family members take turns sitting at her bedside relaying their life to her, only to hear their own doubts and uncertainties reverberate in the resounding silence. At his tenderest moment, Yang, through Yi Yi, delicately, wisely and elegantly portrays the poignant reminiscences of the stirrings of first love and unveils the beauty that all too often shies away in the face of a perceived emptiness of life.

Directed by Edward Yang. With Wu Nien-Jen, Elaine Jin, Issey Ogata

Taiwan/Japan 2000, 35mm, color, 173 min. Mandarin, Min Nan, Hokkien, English, Japanese and French with English subtitles

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Film Screening: A Brighter Summer Day (Guling jie shaonian sharen shijian)
2024-05-04 18:00 - 22:00 | Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Similar to Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989), A Brighter Summer Day also traces the experiences of a large family during a critical historical epoch in Taiwan. Set in the early 1960s, against the backdrop of a society witnessing the consequences of major demographic shifts and political oppression, this film depicts the difficult trials awaiting the simple and harmonious life of the Zhang family. With Yang’s exacting demands on the historical accuracy of the props, such as the family house and the furniture in the classrooms, A Brighter Summer Day splendidly restores the material historical world to us while inquiring into its zeitgeist. Caught between the world of rock ‘n’ roll, gang rivalry, love triangles and the White Terror paranoia, a group of teenagers are compelled to learn to negotiate the tensions and discrepancy between ideals and reality. The adolescent struggles in grasping that which is worth holding on to, be it people or principle, turn out to be an inescapable fate for adults alike.

Widely considered as Yang’s magnum opus, this film, based on a real-life murder, launched Chang Chen’s acting career at the age of fourteen. The brilliant juxtapositions of light and darkness, movement and stasis, sound and silence, all work together to yield a tragic lonesomeness that even the warmth of a bright summer day cannot cure.

Directed by Edward Yang. With Chang Chen, Lisa Yang, Chang Kuo-Chu

Taiwan 1991, DCP, color, 237 min. Mandarin, Min Nan, Shanghainese and English with English subtitles

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Linking East and West: Yue-Sai Kan and her Cross-Cultural Influence
2024-09-16 17:30 - 19:00 | Boston University Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Speaker: Yue-Sai Kan, television host, producer, author, entrepreneur and humanitarianDiscussant: Min Ye, Professor of International Relations, Boston University Pardee School of Global Studies

Yue-Sai Kan, often referred to as ‘The Oprah of China’, is a renowned media entrepreneur, bestselling author, and philanthropist. Her talk promises to offer unique insights into China’s transformation over four decades and the importance of cross-cultural understanding.

A book signing for her book, “The Most Famous Woman in China,” follows the discussion.

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EALS Open House
2024-09-19 12:20 - 13:20 | Austin Hall Room 308, 1515 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
The East Asian Legal Studies program at Harvard Law School supports research and teaching on the law and legal history of the nations and peoples of East Asia, their interaction with the United States, and their impact on global order. Please join us at our Open House to learn about upcoming EALS events and opportunities for students, and to meet faculty, staff, visiting scholars, and other students interested in law and East Asia!

Savory and sweet pastries, coffee, Wong Lo Kat, sikhye, and hojicha will be provided.

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Calligraphy Art Lecture and Workshop
2024-09-25 18:30 - 20:00 | Gund Hall Room 111, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Register now

Speaker: Wang Dongling, Professor of Calligraphy and Director of the Modern Calligraphy Research Center, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou

Paper and ink provided. Register at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScyPdekMiEDa5XhgdmLmHn26csGN_s0FnHG38zBttjS3J422g/viewform

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Flying Flowers and Scattered Snow (飞花散雪): A Performance of Calligraphy by Wang Dongling
2024-09-27 15:00 - 16:00 | Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Wang Dongling 王冬龄, one of China’s most highly regarded contemporary ink painters, will demonstrate his luan shu (“chaotic script”) calligraphy in a special event in the Calderwood Courtyard. In this energetic performance, he will draw upon ancient texts and brush-painting traditions to create a large gestural work focused on the exalted West Lake poems of Su Dongpo (1037–1101). Located in Hangzhou, West Lake has served as a source of inspiration for generations of poets, scholars, and artists, including Wang.

Wang Dongling is professor of calligraphy and director of the Modern Calligraphy Research Center at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. He has held three solo exhibitions at the National Art Museum of China, and his work has been exhibited and acquired internationally. Like many artists of his generation, Wang’s education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), but working outside the constraints of conventional art schools granted him the freedom to explore novel techniques. He returned to his studies in the late 1970s, incorporating foreign approaches into his work throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The Harvard Art Museums offer free admission every day, Tuesday through Sunday. Please see the museum visit page to learn about our general policies for visiting the museums.

This program is made possible in part through the support of Shining (Christina) Sun.

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Susan Greenhalgh - Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola
2024-09-30 12:15 - 14:00 | CGIS South, Room S050, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Register for hybrid zoom attendance

Speaker: Susan Greenhalgh, John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Research Professor of Chinese Society Emerita, Department of Anthropology, Harvard UniversityModerator: Nicole West Bassoff, PhD Candidate in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies. In her new book, Soda Science, Greenhalgh tells the story of how, during 1995-2015, industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. Coke’s research isn’t fake science, she argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and effects of this global science project as it spread in two sites – the U.S. and China – Soda Science reveals the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs.

Note: This is a science studies talk about Prof. Greenhalgh’s new book; a talk for China Studies scholars will be scheduled at a later date.Also via Zoom. Register at: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwsf-2hrjIjHtc03BEGIDG1RTmuG2cUDQUx#/registration

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CID Speaker Series: China and the Global Economy
2024-10-11 12:00 - 13:00 | Ellwood Democracy Lab – Rubenstein 414AB, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
Speakers:David Yang, Director, Center for History and Economics and Professor of EconomicsJie Bai, HKS Associate Professor of Public PolicyMark Wu, Director, Fairbank Center for China Studies; Henry L. Stimson Professor of LawShengqiao Lin, CID and Fairbank Center Post-Doctoral Fellow

The need for policy and public engagement with China—through rigorous analysis, informed perspectives and constructive dialogue— has never been more urgent. Learn more about the Harvard Center for International Development’s new initiative, China and the Global Economy, and how you can get involved. This will be an interactive discussion featuring CID researchers.

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Exhibit: Dunhuang and Beyond
2024-10-18 14:00 - 18:00, 2024-10-19 14:00 - 18:00, 2024-10-20 14:00 - 18:00, 2024-10-25 14:00 - 18:00, 2024-10-26 14:00 - 18:00, 2024-10-27 14:00 - 18:00 | Sackler Building, Lower Level, 485 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138, United States
reserve a ticket

A major milestone and world-renowned heritage site within Silk Road networks, Dunhuang preserves more than 400 embellished Buddhist cave shrines in present-day northwest China.

Dunhuang’s cave shrines date from the fifth to fourteenth centuries. Each encloses visitors within murals and carved figures that depict Buddhist legends and paradises. Chronicling innumerable exemplary works of Buddhist artmaking over centuries, Dunhuang forms the largest encyclopedia art collection in situ. More significant than these artistic achievements, the caves offer a glimpse into a universe that rests beyond our known physical reality. Much like the shadowy illusions of Plato’s allegorical cave, the pictorial programs across Dunhuang’s caves reveal higher truths about life, death, and spiritual transcendence.

This fall, CAMLab contextualizes Dunhuang within Buddhism’s broader currents of space- and art-making that surged across China during the medieval period.• Immersing visitors in confluences of light and sound, the Cave Dance and Shadow Cave projects are case studies of two Dunhuang caves that reimagine the rich theatricality conjured by depictions of the dramas of the Buddha’s life and dances of transcendent beings.

• Rebuilding the world’s tallest pagoda in VR, the Embodied Architecture project invokes an 11the century transmission of these dynamics within the towering Shayka pagoda of the Fogang Monastery in present-day Yingxian, China. There, Buddhist pictorial motifs demarcate a journey of ascension toward enlightenment.

• The Digital Temple project uses an interactive interface to unpack the multiplicity of compositions and multivalent topographies rendered across the murals of Kaihua monastery.

By examining Buddhism’s three primary contexts in medieval China—the cave, the pagoda, and the temple—these CAMLab projects reveal the dramatic perceptual experiences and invisible force fields embedded by visual programs within Buddhist sites.Reserve Your Ticket

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Sheng Liu — Why Climatic Uncertainty Matters to Building Energy Performance: Case Studies in a Subtropical High-Density City
2024-10-23 15:00 - 16:00 | Pierce Hall 100F, 29 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
RSVP

Speaker: Sheng Liu, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Southwest Jiaotong University; Visiting Scholar, Harvard-China Project (SEAS) and Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)

Dr. Sheng Liu is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture, Southwest Jiaotong University who works on climate-responding architecture design and low-carbon city design. His research interests include sustainable architecture design, building performance simulation and optimization, climate change and building adaptation, urban microclimate and indoor thermal comfort. He received his Ph.D. in Architecture from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2021. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Architecture, the University of Hong Kong. He had worked as an architect in mainland China before starting academic research. Dr. Liu has published more than 20 leading peer-reviewed scientific journal publications for the past five years such as in Building and Environment, Sustainable Cities and Society, Energy and Buildings, including two ESI highly citied papers. He is also the recipient of Postgraduate Research Output Award of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2021 and 2023 Green Building Award of HKGBC. For more information, visit his website.

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