Sinophone Classicism

29/04/2025

Dear colleagues, I'm happy to announce that a wonderful volume edited by Justyna Jaguścik, Joanna Krenz, and Andrea Riemenschnitter "Lyrical Experiments in Sinophone Verse
Time, Space, Bodies, and Things" is now published and available through Open Access. You will find in it my article on the avant-garde classicist poet Xutang. Please take a look:

06/06/2024

Our first collaborative publication just appeared today. Please check out this Prism special issue coedited by Zhiyi Yang and David Der-Wei Wang!

Prism | 20 | 2 | September 2023

21/05/2024

Reminder: Prof. Tsu-Chung Su’s lecture tomorrow! 明天蘇子中教授講座哦！

14/05/2024

We cordially invite you to the following hybrid lecture:
Tsu-Chung Su (National Taiwan Normal University)
»Gao Xingjian’s Politics of Resistance and Nonconformist Poetics: The Portrayal of Huineng in the Play and the Production of Gao Xingjian’s Snow in August«
Wednesday, May 22, 2024, 18:00 Uhr / 6 p.m. (Central European Time)
Venue: Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg
The number of participants is limited. Please register here: [email protected].

Participation in the Zoom meeting
Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMvcemgqD4pHtwbv3Xm1wsOHWP42K7I_RkN

About the lecture

Gao Xingjian is a Chinese-born writer and artist who lives in exile in France. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. His play Snow in August is based on the life of Huineng (February 27, 638 – August 28, 713), the Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism and founder of the Sudden Enlightenment School. Drawn from Huineng’s Platform Sutra and various koan cases, the play showcases Gao’s nonconformist poetics, transforming classical notions of acting, dramaturgy, and theatricality, particularly from Beijing Opera, while simultaneously embodying his politics of resistance. The 2002 premiere production of Snow in August in Taipei, directed by Gao Xingjian himself, was an extravaganza.



Intending to explore two core aspects of Gao’s practice in Snow in August, namely, the politics of resistance and nonconformist poetics, I will pose questions such as: Is Huineng, an illiterate Chinese Zen Buddhist master, a religious nonconformist and also a freewheeling political thinker? Is Huineng’s life an embodiment of Gao Xingjian’s self-exile, anti-establishment thinking, and politics of resistance? Is the portrayal of Huineng in the production a successful manifestation of Gao’s nonconformist poetics?



About the speaker
Tsu-Chung Su is Distinguished Professor of English at National Taiwan Normal University. His areas of interest include Nietzsche and his French legacy, theories of hysteria and melancholia, Shakespeare studies, performance studies, Indology, dramatic theory and criticism, and theories of consciousness and mindfulness. Su is the author of three monographs: Artaud Event Book (2018, in Chinese), The Anatomy of Hysteria: What It is, with Some of the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Representations, & Several Critiques of It (2004), and The Writing of the Dionysian: The Dionysian in Modern Critical Theory (1995). – In May 2024 he is a Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University Frankfurt.

12/05/2024

A wonderful workshop week(end) for the Sinophone Classicism project, with friends old and new coming to Frankfurt (Bad Homburg)!

30/04/2024

While the workshop happens in presence, stay tuned for the CFP of an edited volume!

30/04/2024

The Summer 2024 program starts next week!

25/01/2024

Teo Shi-siang’s talk is today! 張斯翔博士的講座就是今天，大家不要錯過哦！

We cordially invite you to our next lecture in the lecture series »Sinophone Classicism. Chinese Cultural Memories in a Global Space« held by Dr Shi-siang TEO, a rising calligrapher and literary scholar.

Shi-siang TEO (National Taiwan University)

»Brushing Through Time: Classical Elegance and Contemporary Expressions in Chinese Calligraphy«

Thursday, January 25, 2024, 18:00 Uhr / 6 p.m. (Central European Time)

Zoom meeting Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMvcemgqD4pHtwbv3Xm1wsOHWP42K7I_RkN

About the lecture

In this lecture, we will commence by exploring several key aspects of calligraphy creation and clarify the pivotal role of creators within these components. As these elements establish the foundation of classical calligraphic aesthetics, our primary focus will be a thorough discussion on how contemporary artists navigate the modern creative landscape, taking into account the context, environment, language, and various methods of presenting their work, all while striving to create calligraphic lyrical works imbued with contemporary significance. In the final part of the lecture, we will also showcase practical examples to provide the audience with a deeper understanding of how meaningful modern lyrical creations can harmoniously emerge within the framework of classical calligraphic aesthetics.



About the speaker
Shi-siang TEO, born in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, holds Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from National Taiwan University. Currently an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Chinese Literature at the same university, his primary research areas include Sinophone Studies, Malaysian Chinese literature and culture, and the pedagogy and practice of calligraphy. In 2008, Teo established a personal studio dedicated to calligraphy projects and artistic creations, and he has organized three individual calligraphy and seal engraving exhibitions in Taipei under the theme »The Trilogy of Drifting«.

15/01/2024

We cordially invite you to our next lecture in the lecture series »Sinophone Classicism. Chinese Cultural Memories in a Global Space« held by Dr Shi-siang TEO, a rising calligrapher and literary scholar.

Shi-siang TEO (National Taiwan University)

»Brushing Through Time: Classical Elegance and Contemporary Expressions in Chinese Calligraphy«

Thursday, January 25, 2024, 18:00 Uhr / 6 p.m. (Central European Time)

Zoom meeting Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMvcemgqD4pHtwbv3Xm1wsOHWP42K7I_RkN

About the lecture

In this lecture, we will commence by exploring several key aspects of calligraphy creation and clarify the pivotal role of creators within these components. As these elements establish the foundation of classical calligraphic aesthetics, our primary focus will be a thorough discussion on how contemporary artists navigate the modern creative landscape, taking into account the context, environment, language, and various methods of presenting their work, all while striving to create calligraphic lyrical works imbued with contemporary significance. In the final part of the lecture, we will also showcase practical examples to provide the audience with a deeper understanding of how meaningful modern lyrical creations can harmoniously emerge within the framework of classical calligraphic aesthetics.



About the speaker
Shi-siang TEO, born in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, holds Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from National Taiwan University. Currently an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Chinese Literature at the same university, his primary research areas include Sinophone Studies, Malaysian Chinese literature and culture, and the pedagogy and practice of calligraphy. In 2008, Teo established a personal studio dedicated to calligraphy projects and artistic creations, and he has organized three individual calligraphy and seal engraving exhibitions in Taipei under the theme »The Trilogy of Drifting«.

12/12/2023

Unfortunately, Prof. Hu's lecture tomorrow is cancelled. Thank you for your support of our lecture series!

06/12/2023

Jun HU (University of California, Berkeley)
»If Columns Could Speak: Sinophone Classicism in Modern Chinese Architectural History«

Wednesday, December 13, 2023, 18:00 Uhr / 6 p.m. (Central European Time)

Zoom meeting Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMvcemgqD4pHtwbv3Xm1wsOHWP42K7I_RkN

About the lecture

Almost at the outset of his Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, Liang Sicheng (1901-1972), architect and architectural historian, isolates a column in the drawing of an interior section. With the empty space filled with a glossary of jargon (largely drawn from the eleventh-century Yingzao fashi), he labels it »the Chinese Order«. In the original Chinese, the anglophone »order« is retained, indicative of a neologism that has yet to be domesticated, and a clear nod to a paradigm of historicizing classical architecture in Europe since the early modern period, now brought to bear on an architectural tradition of equal longevity. The notion of a »Chinese Order« will quickly drop out of later writings on Chinese architecture, and yet the thinking that informs it remains de rigueur and an important part of Liang’s legacy. That is: just like its Classical counterpart in Europe, a column and its auxiliary sections is a heuristic tool that allows the historian a key reference point, a measure of »classicism«. This talk seeks to understand the implications of Liang’s efforts to carve out a »Sinophone classicism« for both history writing and design in the first half of the 20th century, with a view to exploring the boundaries of both halves of the notion as they have been traditionally articulated through literary and Eurocentric studies.


About the speaker
Jun HU is Mr. and Mrs. Pai Ruchu Presidential Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Assistant Professor of Chinese Art and Architecture, at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in art and archaeology from Princeton University in 2014. His research and teaching engage with the history of Chinese architecture and its connections to other scholarly traditions, print culture and painting theory in the early modern period, and interregional interactions between China, Japan, and Korea. He is currently at work on The Perturbed Circle: Chinese Architecture and Its Periphery, an intellectual history of Chinese architecture that spans the two millennia between the Han and Republican periods.


About the lecture series
The lecture is part of the series »Sinophone Classicism. Chinese Cultural Memories in a Global Space«. Please find the program attached.