2022 Past Events
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Tuesday, October 4, 2022
A Human Rights Project Event
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Photography in Kashmir has emerged as a powerful witness to its troubled present. A new generation of photographers, rooted in photojournalism but escaping its limits when they can, have illuminated Kashmiri life in a period of upheaval. Over the last three decades their work has demonstrated the radical part that can be played by photographs in subverting established views of Kashmir—as a beautiful landscape without its people; as an innocent paradise; and more recently, of a paradise beset by mindless violence.
Witness brings together images by nine photographers from Kashmir, the oldest already a working professional in 1986, and the youngest not yet twenty in 2016. The images are by Meraj Uddin, Javeed Shah, Dar Yasin, Javed Dar, Altaf Qadri, Sumit Dayal, Showkat Nanda, Syed Shahriyar, and Azaan Shah.
The text emerged from conversations with documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak, and brings out the varied relationships that each contributor has to photography and to Kashmir, in the process raising questions about the place of artistic practice in zones of conflict.
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Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Ao Wang, Associate Professor of Chinese, College of East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Chinese modern-style poetry, as a genre, was invented in the early twentieth century as a vernacular form of free verse. It deviated radically from the tradition of classical poetry, composed in classical Chinese with strict formal regulations. The division between classical and modern-style poetry has long shadowed the development of modern Chinese poetry. In this talk, I discuss how contemporary Chinese poets are challenging this division by examining their engagement with the iconic classical poet Du Fu (712-770). The great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu has been a perennial poetic model in Chinese culture for more than a millennium. To this day, he remains the most highly acclaimed, most extensively studied, and most widely quoted poet in China. Despite the fact that many modern Chinese poets of the 20th century were well-versed in his work, his impact on modern poetry has not received the attention it deserves, and modern poets’ tributes to him have been exceptions rather than a common practice. In the past two decades, more and more contemporary Chinese poets have written poems to reestablish their relationship with Du Fu. In so doing, they have transformed Du Fu into an enabling figure in their negotiation with the poetic tradition while responding to a highly ideological contemporary culture that has consistently manipulated Du Fu’s legacy.
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Monday, September 26, 2022
Miya Qiong Xie, Assistant Professor, The Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages Program, Dartmouth College
Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk is based on my first monograph, Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia. The book reconceptualizes the contested frontier of modern Manchuria in Northeast Asia as a critical site for making and unmaking multiple national literatures in modern East Asia. In this talk, I use the Chinese writer Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death (1935), a canonical piece of Chinese nationalist literature, to illustrate my conceptions of frontier literature and literary territorialization. Depicting a Chinese Manchuria during the era of Japanese colonial Manchukuo, Xiao Hong’s work exemplifies the process of territory-making through literature. Meanwhile, it features aesthetic and stylistic choices that accommodate the colonial regime, thereby bringing the very translational elements that the author seeks to expel into its formation. By reading Xiao Hong’s work and other works by Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese writers comparatively along the national and imperial margin of modern Manchuria, my book demonstrates how East Asian literatures and cultures co-form in conflict, with mutual inclusion at the very site of exclusion. The book resonates with my broader commitment, as a scholar, to the exploration of how people from the peripheries – geographical or metaphorical – find voices, gain power, and establish connections through transcultural contestation and negotiation.
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Saturday, June 4, 2022
An event supported by NEAC grants
Olin Humanities Building This one-day workshop brings together scholars to create an interinstitutional and interdisciplinary space for new dialogues and research on the intersections of literary criticism and intellectual and cultural history in modern and contemporary Japan. It is the initial step in a long-term, sustained effort to develop a regular and ongoing series of meetings and collective scholarly projects on this topic. Focusing on a series of debates (ronsō) and moments of critique (hihyō) from the Meiji through the Heisei periods, we will examine how intellectual communities, forms of expression, and ideological paradigms emerged and evolved through iterations of sophisticated attacks and public dialogues published in journals and newspapers. The workshop’s participants will collectively demonstrate the ways in which intellectual debates or critiques have played a pivotal role in defining literary and media history in Japan.
The workshop will consist of four roundtable sessions, each comprising two or three papers to achieve open discussions on the following topics: 1. The Creation of the Tokyo-based Literary Establishment and Its Discontents; 2. The Art of Debate and The Politics of Media in Modern Japan; 3. Moving Images and Social Movements: Postwar Japanese Cinema and Literature; and 4. Debating Heisei Japan: Mass Culture and Mass Media. Rather than focusing on typological or categorical approaches to literary and intellectual history, the workshop will be oriented around both diachronic and synchronic lenses to illuminate change and continuity across the historical, aesthetic, and social dimensions of these debates and critical inquiries. At the same time, we will consider media and publishing strategies and the shifting cultural values of the public as a mass audience.
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Thursday, April 28, 2022
Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities,
Stanford University
This event is presented on Zoom.
11:50 am – 1:10 pm EDT/GMT-4
Olympic design needs to express the universal values that the Olympic Movement promotes, and it should be understood easily by a global audience; at the same time, it needs to set the host apart from other nations visually and highlight the uniqueness of its culture. This is a particularly difficult task for non-Western countries, whose national culture and identity can easily fall victim to Orientalism when presented on the world stage. This lecture examines the design style and strategies chosen for the 1988 Summer Olympics and how this design project, which is deemed successful by many, “spectacularly failed” to understand the concepts such as universalism, modernity, modernist design, and Orientalism.
Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung studies politics and aesthetics of modern design with a focus on South Korean and Silicon Valley design. She received her PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in 2020. Trained in graphic design, Gabrielle also writes on the issues of design and feminism. Her book project, Toward a Utopia Without Revolution: Globalization, Developmentalism, and Design, looks at political and aesthetic problems that modern design projects generated in South Korea, a country that has experienced not only rapid economic development but also immense political progress in less than a century, from the end of the World War II to the beginning of the new millennium. In Fall 2022, she will join the Department of Art History and PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine as Assistant Professor of Korean Art History.
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Wednesday, April 27, 2022
E. Tammy Kim (New York Times)
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
When the U.S. military finally withdrew from Afghanistan, an old tally reappeared in the news. Our “forever wars” were not only the live military operations we’d pursued in the Middle East since 9/11; they also encompassed some 500 U.S. bases and installations all over the world, stretching back to the early 20th century. Some call this “empire;” some call it “security,” even “altruism.” In East Asia, the long arm of U.S. power reaches intimately into people’s lives.
South Korea has hosted U.S. military personnel since World War II and remains a primary base of operations in the Asia Pacific. Some thirty thousand U.S. soldiers and marines are stationed there, on more than 70 installations. In 2018, U.S. Army Garrison Humphreys opened in the city of Pyeongtaek, at a cost of $11 billion. Humphreys is now the largest overseas U.S. military base by size and the symbol of a new era in the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Meanwhile, South Korea has become the tenth-richest country in the world and has one of the largest militaries—thanks to universal male conscription and an extraordinary budget. The country’s arms industry is also world-class, known for its planes, submarines, and tanks.
This talk will draw on reporting and family history to explore the evolving U.S.-South Korea alliance. How do the martial investments of these historic “allies” affect the lives of ordinary South Koreans—and Korean Americans? And if the two Koreas are still technically at war, what kind of war is it?
E. Tammy Kim is a freelance magazine reporter and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, covering labor issues, arts and culture, and the Koreas. She cohosts Time to Say Goodbye, a podcast on Asia and Asian America, and is a contributing editor at Lux, a new feminist socialist magazine. She holds fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation and Type Media Center. In 2016, she and Yale ethnomusicologist Michael Veal published Punk Ethnography, a book about the aesthetics and politics of contemporary world music. Her first career was as a social justice lawyer in New York City.
This event is part of the Asian Diasporic Initiative Speaker Series.
For more information, please contact Nate Shockey: [email protected].
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Thursday, April 21, 2022
Andre Haag, Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Hawaii, Manoa
Online Event 5:00 pm – 6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
The field of post/colonial East Asian cultural studies has recently rediscovered the transpacific potential of the theme of ethnic passing, a problematic that is deeply rooted in North American racial contexts but might serve to disrupt global fictions of race and power. Although tropes adjacent to ethnonational passing frequently appear in minority literatures produced in Japan, particularly Zainichi Korean fiction, the salience of the phenomenon was often obscured within the avowedly-integrative and assimilative cultural production of Japanese colonialism. This talk will challenge that aporia by demonstrating how the structural possibility of Korean passing left behind indelible traces of racialized paranoia in the writings of the Japanese colonial empire that have long outlived its fall. Introducing narratives and speech acts in Japanese from disparate genres, past and present, I argue that paranoia was as an effect of insecure imperial modes of containing the passing specters of Korea and Korean people uneasily absorbed within expanding Japan by colonial merger. I trace how disavowed anxieties of passing merge with fears of treachery, blurred borders, and the unreadability of ethnoracial difference in narrative scripts that traveled across space, from the colonial periphery to the Japanese metropole along with migrating bodies, between subjects, and through time. If imperial paranoia around passing took its most extreme expression in narratives of the murderous 1923 “Korean Panic,” popular Zainichi fiction today exposes not only the enduring structures of Japanese Koreaphobia (and Koreaphilia) but the persistence of shared anxieties and precarities binding former colonizer and colonized a century later.
This meeting will be on Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/89025574917
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Friday, April 15, 2022
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Friday, April 15, Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 4:00-6:30 pm. Film screening and panel discussion with filmmaker. Q&A to follow.
Participants:
- Beth Balawick, director of The Son of Fukushima
- William Kando Johnston, John E. Andrus Professor of History, Japanese department, Wesleyan University, researching epidemics, wars and disasters in Japanese history
- Megumi Takahashi, sophomore at Bard (political science major and flute performance at the conservatory), originally from Kamaishi, Iwate, which was destroyed by the tsunami. Her father was one of the first volunteer doctors at the site.
Moderated by Tatjana Myoko v. Prittwitz (Buddhist chaplain) & Hongmin Ahn (chaplaincy intern)
Son of Fukushima (2021) combines live-action documentary and animation to tell the story of a rural family profoundly impacted by two nuclear tragedies: Hiroshima and Fukushima. Against the backdrop of the world’s largest radiological clean-up, the Ouchi family grapples with the inevitabilities of aging, the sacrifices made for those we love, and the relationship between man and nature.
Beth Balawick is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and multimedia producer. She has worked as a producer and cinematographer on feature documentaries including Beyond Belief (2007), The List (2012), The Peacemaker (2016), Second Chance Kids (2017) and Dawnland (2018). Son of Fukushima (2021) is her directorial debut.
William Kando Johnston is the John E. Andrus Professor of History at Wesleyan University. His research focuses on epidemics, wars and disasters in Japanese history. He is working on a book examining the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the disaster of 3/11 is of particular interest to him. Prof. Johnston is also an ordained monk in the Soto Zen lineage.
Light refreshments will be served.
Sponsored by the Bard chaplaincy, the Buddhist sangha club, Japanese studies, and Asian studies. (As of 04/11)
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Thursday, April 14, 2022
Preston 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
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Thursday, April 14, 2022
Jin Xu, Vassar College
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Objects, images, and ideas traveled along the Silk Road through which cities, communities, and cultures on the Eurasian Continent came into contact and influenced one another. In the arts of the Silk Road, ferocious lions featured prominently. This talk focuses on a Sogdian diplomat Yu Hong (533-592) who sojourned and died in the Sui dynasty (581-619) of China. The Sogdians were an Iranian people based in the area around modern-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Sogdian merchants and diplomats frequented Chinese dynasties in the medieval period and even traveled as far to the west as the Byzantine Empire. By focusing on Yu Hong and his sarcophagus (adorned stone coffin), this talk traces the spread of the motif of king-lion combat from West Asia to China, investigating the role played by Sogdian immigrants in introducing an unprecedented symbol of kingship to Chinese emperors during the sixth century CE.
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Thursday, April 14, 2022
Jen Wei Ting
Olin Humanities, Room 201 11:50 am – 1:10 pm EDT/GMT-4
How and why do we come to think of certain paintings or books as “good” art? Through a critical examination of the works of 19th century Southeast Asian painters Raden Saleh and Juan Luna, and a review of recent translated works by Indonesian and Korean writers, we will discuss how race and power dynamics have come to influence and dictate perceptions of artistic merit. By sharing my journey writing and publishing fiction, I hope this can lead everyone to question their own cognitive biases about “good” or “bad” art, and to recognize both the art of whiteness, and the whiteness of art.
Jen Wei Ting is an essayist, novelist and critic whose work has been published in the Economist, Time Magazine, Electric Literature, Catapult, Room Magazine, and more. Born in Singapore and educated in the US and Japan, she lives and thinks in multiple languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and is a prize-winning Chinese screenwriter.
This event is part of the Asian Diasporic Initiative Speaker Series.
For more information: contact Nate Shockey at [email protected].
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Tuesday, April 12, 2022
A Conversation Between Tiffany Tsao and Jen Wei Ting
Online Event 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This event will be held on Zoom.
Tiffany Tsao is the translator of five books by Indonesian authors, including Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu and People From Bloomington by Budi Darma. Her translation of Happy Stories, Mostly was long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize. She also writes fiction and is the author of The Majesties. She’s an ex-academic with an English PhD.
Jen Wei Ting is a fiction writer and essayist whose work has been published or is forthcoming in The Economist, Time Magazine, Catapult, Electric Literature, Room Magazine, Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, CHA: An Asian Literary Journal, and more. Born in Singapore and educated in the US and Japan, she lives and thinks in multiple languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
This event is part of the Asian Diasporic Initiative Speaker Series.
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Saturday, April 9, 2022
Part of the Conference Ink and Sound: a Conference on Chinese Music and Visual Arts
Bard Hall 12:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join students and faculty from the Asian Studies Program and the US-China Music Institute in a multidisciplinary interactive salon, an Elegant Gathering ('Yaji' 雅集) inspired by the traditions of the literati in ancient China, featuring Chinese music and calligraphy demonstrations, plus poetry readings. Professor Li-hua Ying will introduce the event with a talk on how poetry, painting, calligraphy, and music have connected deeply in Chinese culture.
Light lunch and tea will be served.
(Suggested donation; $20 ($10 for students). Cash only.)
This event is part of the US-China Music Institute's fourth annual conference, Ink and Sound: a Conference on Chinese Music and Visual Arts.
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Friday, April 8, 2022
Scholars' Presentations
Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The US-China Music Institute's annual conference, co-presented this year by the Asian Studies Program, invites four scholars to discuss the intersections between Chinese music, calligraphy, and visual arts.
Presentations
Qing 清: the Key Standard of Qin Aesthetics in Song Dynasty China (960-1279)
Meimei Zhang, Occidental College, Department of Comparative Studies in Language and Culture
Silk Strings and Rabbit Hair: Qin Music and Calligraphy
Mingmei Yip, Bard Conservatory of Music, US-China Music Institute
Chinese Calligraphy: History, Significance, and Musicality
Yu Li, Loyola Marymount University, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Chen Zhen: the Harmony of the Life Force
Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky, Bard College, Asian Studies and Art History
Q&A and Discussion to follow.
The Ink and Sound conference is being held in celebration of the completion of the first major phase of the Ink Art and New Music Project, a collaboration between the Bard Conservatory, Hong Kong University, and M+, Hong Kong. During the conference two concerts will feature premieres of seven new musical compositions, each inspired by contemporary ink art in the M+ collection and featuring mixed Chinese and Western instruments.
More information at: Ink and Sound: a Conference on Chinese Music and Visual Arts.
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Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Professor Kyunghee Pyun
Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York
Online Event 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This event will be on Zoom.
Using sociologist Erving Goffman’s theory of “impression management,” the paper explores how citizens in South Korea have constructed their identity by dressing themselves for school and then later for workplace. A mandatory school uniform policy was applied to all the schools from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. A brief period of deregulated school uniform policy in the mid 1980s was succeeded by consumer-centered fashionable student uniforms (haksaengbok), inundated with fashion photography in teen magazines from the 1990s to the present. Students were not the only group of citizens under the strict dress code. During the throbbing process of modernization, industrialization, and globalization in the twentieth century, many female workers were under industry-specific dress code: banks, large corporations, factories, hospitals, retail stores, restaurants, and cultural organizations. Applying the sociological methodologies of impression management, this paper analyzes process and meaning in mundane interaction of students dressed in school uniforms and workers in workplace uniforms. The paper argues that dress code is punitive as it forces individuals to building one’s identity by subjecting oneself submissive to values and desirable performances dictated by authorities. Despite the homogeneous environment of members in the same style of dresses, individuals develop a subtle discernment of one’s physical shortcomings and sartorial habits. They also recognize other people’s physiognomy and styling characteristics. As a way of differentiating themselves within a group dressed alike, members develop a sense of “microstyling” by adjusting minor elements like sleeves, jacket fastening, or helms. Or they resort to measures of enhancing or altering their body parts.
Kyunghee Pyun is associate professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on history of collecting, reception of Asian art, diaspora of Asian artists, and Asian American visual culture. She wrote Fashion, Identity, Power in Modern Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) discussing modernized dress in the early 20th-century. She also co-edited Interpreting Modernism in Korean Art: Fluidity and Fragmentation (Routledge 2021); American Art from Asia: Artistic Praxis and Theoretical Divergence (Routledge 2022); and Expanding the Parameters of Feminist Artivism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). She is writing a new book, School Uniforms in East Asia: Fashioning Statehood and Self (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022; forthcoming) and plans another book entitled Dressed for Workplace.
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Thursday, March 31, 2022
Preston 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
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Tuesday, March 15, 2022
Shuangting Xiong, Ph.D
Chinese, East Asian Languages and Literatures
University of Oregon
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
How can works of art bring about social change? This is the question that haunted and confounded Chinese intellectuals and writers throughout the twentieth century and remains relevant in our present day’s political situation. Melodrama, as an artistic mode, is known for its tendency to resolve structural socio-political problems inherent in capitalist modernity at the level of personal or familial concerns, and in doing so maintains the status quo and disavows revolutionary change. This talk examines the paradoxical pairing of “revolution” and “melodrama” by focusing on the revolutionary model opera film The Red Lantern (1971). Situating it within the long aesthetic tradition of family melodrama and revolutionary culture in China, this talk offers a thematic and formal analysis of how the opera film envisions a revolutionary kinship based on class solidarity and mutual care.
All Bard Community Members are Welcome
Bard is committed to making every effort to provide reasonable accommodations for accessibility needs. RKC 103 Auditorium is a physically accessible space. For any other accessibility needs please contact Erin Braselmann ([email protected]).
*In observance of Covid protocols, only the Bard College community may attend this event.
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Monday, March 14, 2022
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
On Monday, March 14, join Gina Apostol for a reading from her novel Bibliolepsy, followed by a conversation with the writer.
Gina Apostol's fourth novel, Insurrecto, was named by Publishers’ Weekly one of the Ten Best Books of 2018. Her third book, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Her essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts, and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines. Her next novel, La Tercera, is out from Soho Press in 2023. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.
This event is part of the Asian Diasporic Initiative Speaker Series.
Download: Bibliolepsy Excerpt.pdf -
Wednesday, March 2, 2022
Olin Humanities, Room 203 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Please join a work-in-progress session on Wednesday, March 2nd, at 6pm in OLIN 203 for a conversation with the faculty in Asian Studies.
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Thursday, February 24, 2022
Preston 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
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Thursday, February 3, 2022
Campus Center, Weis Cinema 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
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Friday, January 28, 2022
A Chinese New Year Concert with The Orchestra Now
Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The third annual Chinese New Year Concert presented by the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, The Sound of Spring, is a celebration of one of the most important holidays in the Lunar calendar, a time for enjoying friends and family and looking ahead to the bright future of a new year. This year’s concert features Bard’s The Orchestra Now, joined by a select group of top vocal and instrumental artists, performing musical works that showcase the wonderful diversity and artistry of Chinese symphonic music.
Pre-Concert talk with Jindong Cai at 7 PM