Lectures and conversations

Wang considers how digital scenography can transform the presentation and interpretation of cultural heritage. The lecture addresses immersive exhibition design, sensory experience, and the possibilities of translating art-historical knowledge into digital and spatial environments.

A lecture on Liu Kuo-sung’s modern ink painting. Wang proposes the idea of the ‘psychocosmic’ to describe Liu’s movement beyond conventional abstraction toward a visual language connecting interior consciousness, landscape, planetary imagery, and the cosmos. The program also includes a conversation with Liu Kuo-sung.

Wang asks what Buddhist art might become in the twenty-first century and whether it must continue to rely on traditional Buddhist iconography. He explores ecological media, natural phenomena, multisensory experience, digital technology, and interconnectivity as possible directions for contemporary Buddhist art.

Wang reconsiders the relationship between meditation imagery and Buddhist cave architecture. Rather than assuming that caves decorated with meditation scenes were necessarily used for meditation, he examines how meditation could function as a narrative and conceptual framework linking memory, death, visualization, and transformation.

Wang approaches Buddhist caves as premodern immersive environments. Painting, sculpture, architectural space, light, bodily movement, and visualization work together to make otherwise inaccessible Buddhist worlds experientially present, anticipating his later work on immersive media and Buddhist art.

A Harvard version of Wang’s reinterpretation of the First Emperor’s terracotta army. He moves beyond the conventional ‘army guarding the tomb’ explanation to examine the warriors, bronze chariots, acrobats, seasonal cycles, and early Chinese ideas of celestial and cosmic movement as parts of an integrated mortuary system.

Prompted by the discovery of an image and texts concerning Confucius in the tomb of the Marquis of Haihun, Wang asks why Confucius would appear within a funerary context. The talk considers the intersection of recently excavated material, Han funerary imagery, intellectual history, and the programmatic role of images within the tomb.