Chinese Walls: Major Conference in Buffalo

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The "Great Wall," one of the most familiar symbols of China, often is invoked in reference to other barriers throughout the world. Although the icon is globally recognized, however, its historical significance, in fact, its very existence, is a matter of controversy.

From Oct. 20-23, more than 30 scholars from Taiwan, China and North America will converge on the University at Buffalo and Albright-Knox art galleries to examine, in their global contexts, the historical and aesthetic significance of the so-called "Great Wall," along with many other Chinese boundaries, both physical and metaphorical.

The multidisciplinary international research conference, "The Roles and Representations of Walls in the Reshaping of Chinese Modernity," will focus specifically on the changing functions and understandings of walls in China, especially since the inauguration of the policy of "reform" and "opening" in the People's Republic in the 1980s. It will be free and open to the public.

The conference will be held in conjunction with the exhibition, "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art," a major selection of recent painting, rubbings, performances, and installations, that is the most ambitious exhibition of contemporary Chinese art ever to travel beyond China.

Organized by the UB Art Galleries and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in conjunction with the Millennium Art Museum in Beijing, the exhibition is the first collaboration between American and Chinese art museums to focus on contemporary Chinese art.

The art exhibit will open Oct. 21 and run through Jan. 29, 2006, in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1285 Elmwood Ave.; the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus, and the UB Anderson Gallery, 1 Martha Jackson Place.

"The conference and the exhibition have stimulated interaction among a wide range of disciplines along with the inter-institutional cooperation of the UB Art Galleries, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, UB's Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, the Asian Studies Program and a host of academic

departments," says Thomas Burkman, director of Asian studies at UB and chief organizer of the conference.

"It also has created a great deal of interest among many people and institutions well beyond the university, the Albright-Knox and the City of Buffalo," he says.

"Its importance and scope will put Buffalo on the map in the field of Chinese art and scholarship and I hope many area residents will take advantage of this golden opportunity to learn about aspects of Chinese life, culture and art from experts in their fields."

The conference will open Oct. 20 at 4:30 p.m. in the Screening Room in the UB Center for the Arts on UB's North Campus with a keynote address by Arthur Waldron, director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth," a very influential work of scholarship that Publisher's Weekly called "one of the few books that change (a reader's) basic assumptions about China."

Eight panels over the next three days will address urban, cultural and legal walls and their artistic, literary and cinematic depictions.

The conference will conclude on Oct. 23 at 3 p.m. at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery with a closing keynote address by Gao Minglu, curator of "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art" and associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh.

Formerly a UB assistant professor of art history, Gao is a leading authority on 20th- and 21st-century Chinese art and a member of the conference planning committee. He was the curator of "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1998 and the Chinese section of the "Conceptual Art: Point Of Origin 1950s-1980s," an exhibition sponsored by the Queens Museum in New York in 1999. He is the co-author of "Fragmented Memory: The Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile" and also curated the "Chinese Maximalism" exhibition that featured the work of contemporary Chinese artists and was held in the UB Art Gallery from November 2003 through January 2004.

Nine UB scholars will participate as presenters, panel chairs and discussants, along with participants from Princeton University, Henan University, the University of British Columbia, Nanjing University, Cornell University, City University of New York, Yale University, Middlebury College, National Taiwan University and other institutions, including the Millennium Museum in Beijing, the UB Art Galleries and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

The conference is sponsored by the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, W.L.S. Spencer Foundation, UB's Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, UB College of Arts and Sciences, UB Asian Studies Program, UB Department of History, UB Department of Art History, UB

Department of Art, UB Humanities Institute, UB Julian Park Chair in Comparative Literature and the Mentholatum Co., Inc.

The conference Web site at http://cas.buffalo.edu/depts/asianstudies/conferences contains a complete program and other information. Information also may be obtained from members of the organizing committee, including Thomas Burkman burkman@buffalo.edu, Roger Des Forges rvd@buffalo.edu, and Sandra Olsen sholsen@buffalo.edu.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York.