The Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership Symposium: Performance, Media, and Place-Making in East Asia

Organizers: Satoko Shimazaki, Yinghui Wu, Hyun Suk Park, Andrea Goldman

ALC faculty Satoko Shimazaki, Yinghui Wu, and Hyun Suk Park have organized the international symposium Performance, Media, and Place-making in East Asia, which takes place from April 24 to April 26 at UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center. 

The symposium brings together scholars from the US, Canada, China, and Japan in the fields of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean theater, art, cultural history, and performance studies. Speakers will present their research that connects in various ways with performance, media, and space, all broadly conceived, in an effort to launch a new transcultural and interdisciplinary conversation. We will have three touchstone talks on 4/24 (Thursday) afternoon by Vyjayanthi Selinger, Weihong Bao, and Suk-young Kim, followed by an international symposium on 4/25 (Friday) featuring twelve talks by scholars working on Japan, Korea, and China. We will also host a pedagogical round table on the morning of 4/26 (Saturday).

The symposium is funded by the Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership, which was established in 2010 to support the annual Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership and academic conferences, symposia, colloquia and other academic events in the College of Letters and Science. The Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership enhances the intellectual life of UCLA by encouraging exploration and exchange of new ideas and by helping to disseminate the results of those activities to scholarly and general audiences. The symposium is co-sponsored by the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities, UCLA’s Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Asia Pacific Center, Center for Chinese Studies, and Center for Korean Studies. We also receive generous support from the Early Modern Asian Studies Funds (in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures).

Read more about the symposium below and click the symposium website to find more information about the program.

Performance in East Asia often made creative use of places such as gardens, rivers, or even the abstract space of legal discourse. Challenging familiar understandings of the “place” as a mere location, setting, or venue in which a performance event occurs, participants in this symposium will examine the dynamic ways in which a wide variety of performance acts, and their technological mediation in both material and virtual forms, engage in acts of place-making. This symposium brings together scholars of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean theater, art, cultural history, and performance studies whose work connects in various ways with performance, media, and space, all broadly conceived, in an effort to launch a new transcultural and interdisciplinary conversation. The term “media,” here, is invoked in an expansive sense that extends beyond the worlds of print, film, television, and so on, to include the environment itself, material artifacts, and embodied experiences. We hope that adopting this perspective will prompt meaningful dialogue between premodern and modern scholarship on theater and performance in the East Asian cultural fields. What new, transhistorical conversations might become possible if we adopt a perspective that sees the environment as a medium? How have bodies been mediated in space and time in East Asian contexts? How do media relocate or displace bodies? What types of spaces do acts of performance produce?

The first day will feature three touchstone talks; the second will include four thematic panels; and finally, the last day will be devoted to pedagogical questions relating to new techniques for integrating performance and media into teaching and research.