The East Asia Center will be hosting Lanlan Kuang, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida, for the speaker series lecture "Staging Tianxia: The Silk Road and Dunhuang Expressive Arts."

The ancient Silk Road formed an intercontinental network connecting Europe and Asia, facilitating vibrant exchanges of cultural traditions across Eurasia. Extending from Asia to Anatolia and from Thrace to Europe during the Middle Ages, this network profoundly impacted global cultures through the transfer of performing art styles, creating rich and complex adaptations across interconnected nodes. Drawing from Lanlan Kuang’s recent monograph Staging Tianxia: Dunhuang Expressive Arts and China’s New Cosmopolitan Heritage (Indiana University Press, 2024), this talk presents the first major English-language study of how ancient Silk Road performance traditions are being strategically “staged” to articulate a new Chinese worldview. The Dunhuang bihua yuewu (Dunhuang mural dance-music) genre has emerged as one of China’s most potent symbols of multicultural artistic heritage. Kuang’s study analyzes how contemporary cultural agents stage these expressive arts as a performative phenomenon of what she theorizes as a “staged Chinascape” (Zhongguo jingguan 中國景觀)—a fluid, open conceptual landscape emerging from the revived ancient Chinese concept of tianxia 天下 (all under heaven). Offering insights into the intersection of heritage, performance, and soft power in twenty-first-century China, the author invites discussion on how these performance practices have gained renewed significance since China’s 2013 Belt and Road Initiative, transforming ancient Silk Road imagery into a contemporary vehicle for articulating an alternative vision of world order within China’s evolving cultural diplomacy and cosmopolitan heritage discourse.

Join us for the talk, held online on Zoom, Thursday, October 16, from 5:15 - 6:30pm.

To attend, please use the Zoom Webinar link here.