Stephen F. Teiser, "Sickness in Chinese Buddhism: Perspectives from Art and Ritual"

April 21, 2017

Dr. Stephen F. Teiser presented a talk, "Sickness in Chinese Buddhism: Perspectives from Art and Ritual," at the University of Arizona on December 5, 2016. 

Abstract: Canonical Buddhist texts proclaim that sickness is one of the four signs of sentient existence: birth, aging, sickness, and death. In this view, only perfect beings such as the Buddha are capable of evading the clutches of impermanence. At the same time, Buddhists all over the world engage in practices to cure illness and secure a happier fate. They imagine a robust, healthy life in Buddhist terms. This lecture reviews some of the broader Buddhist understandings of illness, drawing particularly on the ritual texts and paintings of medieval Chinese Buddhism. This event was sponsored by the College of Humanities East Asian Studies.

Stephen F. Teiser is D.T. Suzuki Professor in Buddhist Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where he also serves as Director of the interdepartmental Program in East Asian Studies. He is interested in the interaction between Buddhism and indigenous Chinese traditions, brought into focus through the wealth of sūtras, non-canonical texts, and artistic evidence unearthed on the Silk Road.

 

Hai Ren, "Socially Engaged Art and Urban Renewal"

April 18, 2017

In December 2016, Professor Hai Ren was invited by Redtown, an organization based in Shanghai, to give a public speech on the topic "socially engaged art and urban renewal” at a creative city festival in the City of Chongqing, China. Aiming at urban planners, architects, designers, and the general public, Professor Ren discussed practices of socially engaged art in four cities (New York, London, Detroit, and Chengdu). His speech has been widely circulated on Chinese social media like WetChat. If you read Chinese, you can read his speech here. Here is an English summary of the talk:

When we speak of the relationship between socially engaged art and urban renewal, we look at the issue in the post-industrial urban context: culture as a major productive force in the creative economy. During the industrial period, art related to a public culture in the city through art exhibits and representations in art museums. In the post-industrial period, when manufacturing no longer occupies an important place in society, art engages a city more directly. Conventional art museums are a necessary part of a creative city, but only as one type of creative space. Meanwhile, artists are no longer confined to their studios. Many choose to participate in the development, renewal, and reproduction of an urban community, and to contribute to improving the quality of life for urban residents. In the global context of the creative city, the close relationship between art and everyday life is often expressed through various kinds of creative spaces. 

Professor Ren discusses how artists in four major cities in three continents (New York, Detroit, London, and Chengdu) engage urban spaces and everyday lives through their arts. Drawing on his research, Professor Ren examines the "maintenance art" practices by the New York-based feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles; urban renewal arts by Detroit-based artists and groups such as Power House Productions (established by Mich Cope and Gina Reichert) and Olayami Dabls; and community arts by Chengdu-based artists such as Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun.    

After discussing art practices in these cities, Professor Ren argues that although these cities have different cultural and historical backgrounds, they all address emerging issues and future uncertainties. As art is increasingly tasked to play an important role in planning and developing a creative city, it does not follow one globe model of engaging with a city. Not only do art institutions (art museums and galleries) become important creative spaces, but they also constitute an infrastructure through which a city engages with the rest of the world. For artists, their artistic identity is two-fold. An artist is both a resident of a community or in an urban space and a specialist who is capable of shaping the production of a meaningful urban space. In the former situation, an artist identity is rooted in everyday life, the source of artistic singularity. In the latter situation, the identity of the artist comes from art's potentiality in social transformation. Compared with urban planning and market-driven strategies in addressing emerging problems and future uncertainties, art is a distinctive means of production, one that is capable of going beyond itself, opening up possibilities, and broadening our perspectives.

Arizona at AAS

March 11, 2017

The Department of East Asian Studies will be well-represented at this year's Association for Asian Studies annual conference in Toronto, with several faculty members and graduate students presenting papers:

Barbara Greene:
The Embodiment of Horror: Kuchisake Onna and Domestic Violence

Scott W. Gregory:
“The Art of Subtle Phrasing Has Been Extinguished”: The Outlaw as Exemplar of Self-Cultivation in Jin Shengtan’s Water Margin

Fabio Lanza:
The Place of Desire: On Going and Not Going to China in the Long Sixties

Noel J. Pinnington:
Buddhism and Kyōgen: Shifts in the Representation of Priests Entering the Tokugawa Era

 

Dr. Jiang Wu, "Chinese Religion From a Geographical Perspective"

When
3:30 p.m., Oct. 21, 2016
Where
ENR2 Building, Room S230

The School of Geography & Development Presents: Chinese Religion From a Geographical Perspective: The Regional Religious System (RRS) Approach
A talk by Dr. Jiang Wu
The concept of Regional Religious System (RRS) is a new way to study the pattern of spatial distribution of religious sites and their relationship with other social and cultural factors. However, many theoretical and methodological issues have not yet been solved. In this talk, Dr. Wu will discuss these theoretical and methodological issues and contemplate further on the validity of the application of RRS to the study of religion. Adopting William Skinner's Macro-regions theory and spatial analysis methods, Dr. Wu examines various factors in the formation of RRS in China. Insights will be gained as to the religious site distribution patterns and the formation of various religious networks.

Jiang Wu is currently a professor in Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. He received his Masters degree from Nankai University (1994) and Ph.D. from Harvard University (2002). Sponsored by multiple grants from various funding agencies, he has been working on GIS projects and creating datasets for Buddhist Geographic Information System (BGIS) for more than fifteen years. Right now, he is perfecting the method and theory of Regional Religious System (RRS) he and others proposed in an article published in 2013. Other research interests include seventeenth-century Chinese Buddhism, especially Chan/Zen Buddhism, the role of Buddhist canons in the formation of East Asian Buddhist culture, and the historical exchanges between Chinese Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism. He is the author of Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-century China (Oxford, 2008), Leaving for the Rising Sun: Chinese Zen Master Yinyuan and the Authenticity Crisis in Early Modern East Asia (Oxford, 2015), and editor of Spreading Buddha’s Word in East Asia: The Formation and Transformation of the Chinese Buddhism Canon (Columbia, 2016).

Friday, October 21st - 3:30 pm
Refreshments starting at 3:00pm
ENR2 Building, Room S230

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