Academics Online：Digital Harassment Across Asias

Wednesday, February 16, 2022
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Live via Zoom

This webinar, the first in the three-part series of Academics Online events, will offer lightning talks by scholars of China, Japan, India, and Hong Kong, with the aim of building knowledge and awareness of critical issues surrounding public-facing scholarship, activism, and online harassment in Asian Studies. Over the last several years, virtual spaces have become a significant site of misinformation, disinformation, and mobilization among extremist communities. Internet-based activism and political mobilization are not a new phenomenon; yet, alarmingly, in much of the world, right wing populists, conspiracy theorists, history deniers and the like have been invigorated by the possibilities of connecting online and have grown in size and strength. Many such actors have turned the internet into a battle ground, engaging not only in recruiting and radicalizing supporters but also in campaigns of harassment of their opponents. Asia has been a particularly important venue for the growth of this phenomenon, and online harassment has been a growing problem that regularly impacts researchers and activists who become targets of those who oppose their political and scholarly stances. Despite the imminent personal and professional threats such campaigns pose not only to academic freedom at large but also to the safety of our colleagues and allies, conversations about how, where, and why these movements are occurring across the globe, and across Asias in particular, have been slow to begin. This event will be one starting point for these discussions.

Please Note：While some speakers will make their presentations available after the event, the entirety of the discussion will not be recorded.

For session participants, please check out this website

A Line in the Sea：the Cartographic Construction of the Maritime Border in 16th Century China & The Case of the Qing Dynasty

Friday, February 18, 2022
1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
6275 Bunche Hall

This talk offers an overview of how several interlocking research projects undertaken in the previous decade and planned for the next decade provide a new lens for understanding the development of the Qing dynasty and its relationship to the modern Chinese state. At the center of this research agenda is the figure of the "case（案）" of the Qing dynasty. Anyone who has worked in a local Qing archive can attest to the fact that these repositories of government documents are full of "cases." But what is a case, and how did they determine the way that the empire came together? In this talk, Dykstra will review how the technologies of case-making not only slowly began to link together local administrative offices with overseers in the central bureaucracy of Beijing, but also forged ties of accountability and information-sharing that played a pivotal role in late nineteenth-century political developments, the constitutional crisis of the early twentieth century, and even in political institutions after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution.

After graduating from the UCLA History Department in 2014, Maura Dykstra accepted a position in the Caltech Division of Humanities and Social Sciences. Over the years she has held visiting fellowships and postdoctoral appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Legal Theory and Legal History, the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law, Taiwan's Center for Chinese Studies, the Harvard Fairbank Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her first book, scheduled for publication with the Harvard University Asia Center Press in the summer of 2022 and titled Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine：The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-century Qing State, documents the first hundred years of Qing central state efforts to supervise the territorial bureaucracies. Her current book project, State as Bond：The Making and Unmaking of Peoples on the Southwestern Frontier of the Late Empire, offers an administrative and institutional perspective on the colonizing projects of the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Workshops on the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Statuary - Day 1

Archeological Presentation

Thursday, February 24, 2022
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Live via Zoom

Register here for Day 1

Register here for Day 2

Recent archeological excavations undertaken by the Shaanxi Archaeological Academy have uncovered the two so far earliest Buddhist statues in China. Uncovered from an Eastern Han-period（23-220 CE）family tomb, they predate other early pieces of free-standing Chinese Buddhist statuary by approximately 200 years. Although they appear to have been locally produced, their stylistic features display marked similarities to the Gandhāran art from present-day northwestern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The discovery of these startling new statues thus brings into question established chronologies of the development of Buddha images across Asia, and it points to early Inner Asian networks of trade and religious exchange that have received little scholarly attention so far.

This workshop consists of two parts. On Day 1, the Center for Chinese Studies and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA will host an archeological presentation by the director of the Shaanxi Archaeological Academy, Dr. Sun Zhouyong, and his team of excavators, followed by a podium discussion centered on the archaeological, art-historical, and historical context of the newly discovered statues. On Day 2, a roundtable hosted by the Center for Buddhist Studies at UCLA will bring together a diverse group of specialists to discuss what these newly-excavated pieces of statuary mean for the study of Buddhism and Buddhist art.

Day 1：February 24, 2022 @ 4pm PST; February 25, 2022 @ 8am CST
Day 2：February 25, 2022 @ 4pm PST; February 26, 2022 @ 8am CST


Day 1：Archeological Presentation Participants

Sun Zhouyong （director of the Shaanxi Provincial Academy of Archaeology）is a specialist in prehistoric and Bronze Age archaeology.

Li Ming （deputy director of the Yangling Imperial Mausoleum Museum）specializes on Sui-Tang epigraphy and archaeology.

Zhao Zhanrui （research fellow of the Shaanxi Provincial Academy of Archaeology）
is field archaeologist specializing on Sui-Tang mortuary archaeology

Lothar von Falkenhausen （Distinguished Professor of Chinese Archaeology and Art History）works on archaeology of the Chinese Bronze Age, focusing on ritual and economic archaeology as well as trans-Asiatic contacts.

Minku Kim （Assistant Professor of Art History, Chinese University of Hong Kong）specializes on China between the Han and Six Dynasties（206 BCE-589 CE）, particularly in relation to Buddhism.

He Yanxiao （PhD candidate in Ancient History, University of Chicago）works on social and cultural history of Greek Central Asia, relationship between Rome and the east, history writing in the ancient world.

Li Min （Associate Professor of East Asian Archaeology, UCLA）works on Neolithic and Early Bronze Age archeology of China, ritual landscape and material culture

Day 2：Roundtable in Buddhist Studies Participants

Robert L. Brown is Professor of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the University of California Los Angeles and Curator in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Eric Greene is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University and publishes widely on Chinese Buddhism in its earliest phase of development.

Sonya Lee is Associate Professor of Chinese Art and Visual Cultures at the University of Southern California, where she also holds a joint appointment in Art History, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Religion.

Diego Loukota is Assistant Professor of Indian and Central Asian Buddhism in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California Los Angeles and is also the Inner Asian Section Chair for the American Oriental Society.

Wannaporn Rienjang is Lecturer in the Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology at Thammasat University. Trained in archeology and Gandharan Studies, she is a Project Consultant for the Gandhara Connections Project at the University of Oxford.

Workshops on the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Statuary - Day 2

Roundtable in Buddhist Studies

Performing Contemporary Chinese Calligraphic Art

Thursday, March 3, 2022
11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Live via Zoom

Register here for Zoom link: Register Here

Calligraphy entered contemporary Chinese art at the time modernist art reappeared in China in the 1980s, and gradually became an important component in contemporary art. Because the Chinese written language is partially ideographic and partially pictographic, calligraphy-related works can be categorized into a few groups. The first group can be traced back to traditional calligraphy, but the artists try to employ modern concepts and methodologies. The second group is to add calligraphic elements to other forms of visual art. These two groups basically explore the use and representation of calligraphic languages and elements. The third group introduces the Chinese writing system, or the structure of the character, to conceptual art, including new media art. In works of contemporary Chinese art, we see that expression of the calligraphic language and application of characters present many serious obstacles. On the other hand, calligraphy and Chinese characters as sources still have great potential. These artists, regardless of what concepts, methods, or formats they use, self-consciously link their art to the construction of cultural identity and social circumstances of contemporary society. This artistic phenomenon has already become an important part of contemporary visual culture.


Dr. Kuiyi Shen is Professor of Art History, Theory & Criticism at University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Asian art. Among his publications are A Century in Crisis：Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth Century China （1998）; Chinese Posters （2009）; Arts of Modern China （2012, winner of the 2103 ICAS Book Prize in Humanities）; Light Before Dawn：Unofficial Chinese Art 1974-1985 （2013）; Liangyou：Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926-1949 （2013）; and Luis Chan （2019）. He is a recipient of fellowships and awards from National Endowment of Art, Social Science Research Council, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Ishibashi Foundation, Stanford University, Leiden University, University of California, University of Heidelberg, and others. He is also the managing editor of Brill’s book series Modern Asian Art and Visual Culture.

Sponsor（s）: Center for Chinese Studies