The Harvard Club of Singapore (HCS) invites you to a talk by Professor Eugene Wang.
Date & Time: Monday 7 August 2023 at 6:15pm
Location: Conference Room, BHG Retail Trust Management, 250 North Bridge Road, Raffles City Tower, #32-01, Singapore 179101
RSVP Link: https://profeugenewang.peatix.com/
This event is free and open to all Harvard Club of Singapore (HCS) members in Singapore. Sign up for membership here if you’re not: https://harvard.sg/membership-account/membership-levels/
Seats are limited so do sign up ASAP!
Art, Science, and Buddhism: What is Left Unsaid?
By Professor Eugene Wang
Where do art, science and Buddhism converge? The question usually takes us to familiar grounds: meditation, mindfulness, consciousness, inter-subjectivity (non-self), flux etc. Is there anything flying under our radar screen that ranges beyond these familiar topoi? Force fields is definitely one of those blindspots.
The notion conveniently connects modern physics to the time-honoured Chinese concept of “force” (qi) and “field” (chang). With its currency in physics, social psychology, science fiction, and art, the term points to, among other things, an individual’s or group’s psychological environment with its evolving dynamics, varying intensities and experiential qualities. Technology-inflected modern art that treats forms as forces in an abstract domain and negative space further highlights the relevance of the concept.
Add Buddhist notions of “place of practice” (Ch. daochang; Skt. Bodhimanda) to the mix, we have a complicated but intriguing case. The nonlocality of the performance space implied by both Buddhist place of practice (daochang) and site of theatrical performance (juchang) aligns well with the nonlocality of space increasingly gaining currency in modern physics. In light of this, we might rethink a baseline question long taken for granted: where exactly does art take place? In this day and age of virtual reality and media technology, the question becomes all the more pressing and pertinent.
About Professor Eugene Wang
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art, Harvard University
Buddhist Art of Asia; Chinese Art, Architecture, and Media Studies
Founding Director of Harvard FAS CAMLab
Eugene Y. Wang is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University. A Guggenheim Fellow (2005), he is the art history editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004). His extensive publications range from early Chinese art and archaeology to modern and contemporary Chinese art and cinema. His book, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005), explores Buddhist worldmaking; it received the Sakamoto Nichijin Academic Award from Japan. His current research focuses on cognitive study of art and consciousness as well as biocentric art that integrates visual, biological, and ecological systems.
He is also the founding director of Harvard CAMLab that explores the nexus of cognition, aesthetics, and mindscape. The CAMLab projects he heads explores multimedia storyliving and immersive artistic-cum-spiritual experience, integrating humanistic research and sensorial media practice. CAMlab’s current projects include Digital Gandhara, a massive mapping of Buddhist sites in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Shadow Cave which probes the enduring cognitive model behind Asian Buddhist caves.