CC Lecture Series — Sin Wai Kin Chinese Humanities Development Fund
Events
The lectures listed below organised by CC were supported by the Sin Wai Kin Chinese Humanities Development Fund:
1. Fifty Years of Protecting Diaoyu Islands Movement: The Past, the Present, and the Cross-Strait Relations
Speaker: Chih-ming Wang, Academia Sinica
Prof. Wang analysed the Baodiao movement in three aspects: patriotism, geopolitics, and local history, and discussed how they are mutually constitutive within the larger historical forces—postcoloniality, globalisation, and post-Cold War reconfiguration.
2. The Travels of Lao Can and Yellow River Floods in the Late Qing
Speaker: Hsu Hui-Lin, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Dr Hsu Hui-Lin's speech shed light on the relationship between environmental crises and the inception of national identity in late 19th and early 20th century China by examining how The Travels of Lao Can (老殘遊記) was shaped by and responded to the trauma caused by the Yellow River floods in Shandong in the year 1889.
3. Intersexuality and Crossover in Hong Kong Cantonese Opera female actors: The Interaction between Stage and Screen
Speaker: Li Siu Leung, Lingnan University
Citing a variety of materials, Prof. Li placed the gender crossover of Cantonese opera female actors in the broader history of the development of Chinese opera, and argued that the performance formula of the Chinese opera stage makes the gender crossover of opera actors possible. The entire lecture is centered on the intersexual and cross-border performance practices of female Cantonese opera performers, enlightening the audience with a comprehensive analysis of cultural studies, gender studies, and opera studies.
4. Rediscovering Early Chinese Cinema: From the Archive to the Internet
Speaker: Christopher Rea, University of British Columbia
The Chinese Film Classics project, begun before and accelerated by the pandemic, is aimed at enabling a new generation of global audiences to explore Chinese film history in new ways. Working with a corpus of several score extant films, circa 1920s-1940s, Prof. Rea has been translating both famous and obscure cinematic works and making them available open access in full or in part (so far as copyright and fair use allows), via the YouTube channel Modern Chinese Cultural Studies and the website chinesefilmclassics.org. This talk presented new web-based approaches to film research and pedagogy, and invites the participation of film scholars and film archives in further developing this open-access initiative.
5. A look at the singing and style of Kunqu through The Peony Pavilion
Speaker: Xing Jin-sha, The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts
The lecture began with the history and musical characteristics of Kunqu. Originally a simple chant, it was only through the literati that it developed into a rigorous form of music. The rigorous Kun opera has been very popular with playwrights and has produced many excellent works. The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu is an excellent Kunqu play that has remained popular for hundreds of years and is loved by many people. The lecturer picked out the music of The Peony Pavilion and explained and taught how to sing and appreciate it.
