2014
Matteo Ricci: His Map and Music (Concert)
Institute for Advanced Study and ¡Sacabuche!, 2014
The Geiss Hsu Foundation supported a second performance of Matteo Ricci: His Map and Music, presented at Best Buy Theater at the University of Minnesota on May 5, 2014. The concert featured music, words, and images to explore the 1602 map of the world in Chinese made by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci while he was in China. The Baroque instruments and voices of the musical group ¡Sacabuche! were joined by Chinese instruments.
2014
Ming: Courts and Contacts 1400–1450
The British Museum, 2014
Principal Investigator(s): Craig Clunas, Oxford University; Jessica Harrison Hall, The British MuseumComplementing the British Museum’s exhibition, Ming: 50 Years that Changed China, this major conference brought together more than 30 Ming scholars from across the globe, who presented new perspectives and research papers about the Ming spanning 1400–1450. Focusing on the aftermath of the Zhu Yuanzhang’s overthrow of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, the conference examined the role of China’s imperial and provincial princely courts, and discussed China’s relations and exchanges with other parts of the world.
2013
Conference on Biography in East Asia, 1400–1900
University of British Columbia, 2013
Principal Investigator(s): Adam Bohnet, King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario; Ihor Pidhainy, Marietta College; Leo K. Shin, University of British ColumbiaHeld at St. John’s College and the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, the conference explored the different types of biography in East Asian countries from 1400 to 1900. Presenters challenged the traditional position maintained by past studies that the biography in China and Korea was simply a means to compartmentalize individual lives into pre-established moral categories. Papers and panel discussions examined the ways in which various standard biographies, public or private, treated their subjects. Ming Studies published a summary of the conference (2013, issue 68), and the research presented was collected in Representing Lives in China: Forms of Biography in the Ming-Qing Period, 1368-1911 (Cornell University East Asia Program, 2018).
Conference program: https://geissfoundation.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/JPGFWeb-3D-1a-ConfBioSchdl-16Feb14.pdf
Publication: https://eap.einaudi.cornell.edu/publication/new-representing-lives-china-forms-biography-ming-qing-period-1368-1911
2013
Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China
By Craig Clunas
Reaktion Press, 2013

Screen of Kings is the first book in any language to examine the cultural role of the regional aristocracy or ‘kings’ – relatives of the emperors – in Ming dynasty China (1368–1644). Through an investigation of their patronage of architecture, calligraphy, painting and other art forms, and through examination of the contents of their splendid and recently excavated tombs, this innovative study puts the aristocracy back at the heart of accounts of China’s cultural and artistic histories, from which they have until very recently been excluded.
2012
Commemorative Landscape Painting in China
By Anne de Coursey Clapp
Tang Center for East Asian Art, Princeton University in association with Princeton University Press, 2012

When is a landscape more than a landscape? This is a richly illustrated study of an important genre of Ming-dynasty Chinese painting in which landscapes are actually disguised portraits that celebrate an individual and his achievements, ambitions, and tastes in an open effort to win recognition, support, and social status. In this unique study, Anne de Coursey Clapp presents a broad view of these commemorative landscape paintings, including antecedents in the Song and Yuan dynasties.
2012
Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China
By Shih-shan Susan Huang
Harvard University Asia Center, 2012

Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries. In this richly illustrated book, Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images and reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism. She shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart.
2011
Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China
By J.P. Park
University of Washington Press, 2012

Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing published a series of lavishly illustrated books that were the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated. Art by the Book describes how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public, and both gratified and shaped their sensibilities. As a commodity of early modern China, when cultural standing was measured by a person’s command of literati taste and lore, painting manuals provided nonelite readers with a device for enhancing social capital.
2011
History with Chinese Characteristics: From Ming to Globalization
Center for Early Modern History, University of Minnesota, 2011
Held in honor of Edward “Ted” Farmer’s retirement from the University of Minnesota after 43 years of teaching, the two-day “mini-conference” covered a broad range of topics, including Chinese culture, Ming institutions, world history, and modern China.