Sydney Ideas

How to modernise art for a modern China? What ideas and practices should China adapt from the West? Such questions figured prominently in intellectual debate about modernisation at the start of the twentieth century. Within a few decades, art in China had undergone dramatic change, from conception through production to reception. This public lecture will look at Chinese art practice and art debate at the time with a focus on the first Chinese national art exhibition in Shanghai in 1929.

SPEAKER: Dr Yiyan Wang, Chair of Chinese Studies, the University of Sydney

For speaker's biography see: tinyurl.com/jyxabv3

This forum and open discussion with Australia’s leading China commentators was hosted by Dr James Reilly, Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney.

Participants included:

Professor Michael Wesley, Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy

Dr Richard Rigby, Executive Director of the ANU China Institute

Dr John Garnaut, China correspondent, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age

Chaired by Professor David Goodman, Chinese Politics, University of Sydney.

A Sydney Ideas lecture by James E Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Trained in physics and astronomy, Hansen is best known for his Congressional testimony on climate change in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of global warming. He has been an active researcher in planetary atmospheres and climate science for nearly 40 years, with the last 30 years focused on climate research, publishing more than 100 scholarly articles on the latter topic.

Time Magazine designated Dr. Hansen as one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2006, a tribute to his continuing efforts to serve the public through his scientific work.

For more info see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2010/professor_james_hansen.shtml

Confucius (traditional dates 551-479 BCE) lived during the waning years of the Zhou dynasty. He was deeply troubled by the disorder of his age and took it upon himself to teach others about Zhou virtues as well as to instruct them on how to cultivate such virtue in themselves. Confucius’s efforts mark the beginning of the traditional Chinese emphasis on education and the crucial role of self-improvement and self-cultivation in any ethical system. Some of his followers refined his teachings on the importance of education while philosophers from competing schools of thought rejected Confucian ideas as outmoded and ineffective.

First Emperor of Qin (239-210 BCE) assumed the throne as king at a young age and was aided and tutored by a brilliant minister named Lü Buwei. The young king eventually outgrew his minister and aggressively took over the reins of government himself. He conquered his enemies and created an empire in 221 BCE. The First Emperor appointed as his chief minister an accomplished legalist thinker named Li Si. Together they created a philosophy for empire based on the primacy of law, the high (and almost god-like) status of the emperor, and a system of universal standards that embraced everything from thought to weights and measures. These features of his rule continue as hallmarks of Chinese governance to this day.

SPEAKER: Professor Jeffrey Riegel, Professor and Head of School of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts

In 2004, construction began in Jerusalem on the local branch of the Los Angeles-based Museum of Tolerance, designed by the leading American architect, Frank Gehry. The museum is now being built over the remains of what had been the largest and most important Muslim cemetery in Palestine, which had been in continual use from the time of the Crusades up until 1948.

Professor Saree Makdisi examines the clash between the two competing claims to the same site, and offers a paradigmatic case to explore and rethink the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, since all of the elements of the larger conflict are also in play in the struggle over this specific site.

For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2009/excavating_memory_jerusalem.shtml

SPEAKER: Professor David Goodman, Professor of Chinese Politics, and Director, Institute of Social Sciences

Mao Zedong (1893-1976) is best known as the founder of the People’s Republic of China. He led the Chinese Communist Party from 1935 until his death, and brought it to political power in 1949. Mao is well known as a revolutionary, a guerrilla leader, a political and military strategist and icon for post-modern art. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that started in the mid-1960s he attacked the establishment of the new party state in China for “succumbing to the sugar coated bullets of the bourgeoisie”, though his motives have always been a matter of controversy inside as well as outside the People’s Republic of China. Mao himself was always anxious to be seen as an ideologist, as well as an active revolutionary. The lecture will introduce the different and often competing strands in his ideology, which remain an important legacy for China today.

How does the past shape the present? Should history play a role in shaping politics today? Should we be held accountable for the wrongs of the past? Does history divide or unite us? Join prominent Australian and American scholars for an open discussion of these and other issues. Panellists will also explore how and what we remember collectively, and how this contributes to our sense of patriotism, nationalism, or indeed, alienation. With: Bob Carr, former Premier of New South Wales; Professor David Blight, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University; Professor W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of North Carolina; Profesor James T. Campbell, Stanford University; Professor Jonathan Hansen, Harvard University; and Professor Glenda Sluga, the University of Sydney,

For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2009/why_history_matters.shtml

At the same time that we have been developing the capabilities to detect distant Earths, we have also been finding that life on Earth occurs in places that earlier scientists would have considered too hostile to support life. We now know that extremophiles can exist (and sometimes thrive) in the most astounding places.

Since life-as-we-know-it is so extraordinarily hardy, might it exist on any of the exoplanets that are being found?

In this 2009 Sydney Ideas lecture, professor Jill Tarter discussed what was then known about life on other planets, as well as the questions that would likely remain unanswered until new technologies enable new explorations. She argued that it might even turn out that our first indication of another inhabited world will be the signals deliberately generated by its inhabitants.

For more info see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2009/extremophiles_exoplanets.shtml

Artist, curator and producer Fiona Winning discusses the often problematic relationship between the hard and soft infrastructure - of arts buildings and the artists and organisations that work in them.

This lecture was the 2009 Rex Cramphorn Lecture.

For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2009/rex_cramphorn.shtml

Dr Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, explained how the "stunning" economic and social changes of the past decade in Israel and the Occupied Territories have undermined the possibility of peace in the region.

Dr Roy was in Australia to deliver the University of Adelaide's Edward Said Memorial Lecture.

For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2008/beyond_occupation.shtml