Speaker: Prof. Wang Xingyi

On 28 October 2025, ICS Public Lecture has invited Prof. Wang Xingyi to deliver a talk with the theme of “Tōseiden: Sino-Japanese Communication and the Vinaya Tradition.”

Prof. Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Trained as a Buddhologist specializing in East Asian Buddhist history and thought, her research interests include Buddhist monasticism, Vinaya studies, Pure Land, ethics, and Buddhist literature. She received her MTS from Harvard Divinity School (2015) and Ph.D. from Harvard University (2021). Prof. Wang is currently working on a monograph on the commentarial tradition of the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya and the formation of the Vinaya School through cultural exchanges between Song China and Kamakura Japan.

During her talk, Prof. Wang explored how Tōseiden is not a simple historical record but a complex cultural product involving image, narrative, textual tradition, ritual, sacred geography, and historiography. Commissioned by the monk Ninshō in 1298 and gifted to Tōshōdaiji, the scroll reflects a resurgent interest in the Vinaya tradition during the Kamakura period. Prof. Wang highlighted how the “reconstruction” of Jianzhen’s journey transformed the Vinaya tradition from an abstract idea into a visualized event, reimagining a disrupted lineage through art.

Through detailed analysis of scenes such as Jianzhen’s ordination, the ritual of conferring precepts, and the depiction of sacred landscapes, Prof. Wang demonstrated how Tōseiden serves as a medium for cultural memory and religious identity. The talk emphasized that such artworks are not merely commemorative but performative, shaping the understanding of Buddhist transmission and the Vinaya tradition in East Asia.


Picturing Displacement: Yip Yan-chuen 葉因泉 (1903–1969) and the Afterlife of the Liumin tu 流民圖 Tradition

Speaker: Dr. Alice Bianchi

On 26 November 2025, ICS hosted a public lecture by Dr. Alice Bianchi with the theme of “Picturing Displacement: Yip Yan-chuen 葉因泉 (1903–1969) and the Afterlife of the Liumin tu 流民圖 Tradition”.

Dr. Bianchi is an Associate Professor of Art History at Université Paris Cité and a visiting scholar at the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, Hong Kong. She holds degrees in Chinese Studies and Art History from Inalco (Paris) and the University of Bologna, and earned her Ph.D. from Inalco. Her research focuses on genre painting and visual representations of disaster and relief in late imperial China and the Republican period, with additional interests in Japanese art historical treatises and Sino-Japanese artistic exchange.

During the lecture, Dr. Bianchi explored how Yip’s album combines a manhua-inspired graphic idiom with the long-standing Liumin tu tradition, which is the paintings of disaster refugees, while departing from wartime propaganda and heroic imagery. Instead of glorifying resistance, Yip focused on the suffering of civilians, especially children, whose frail bodies recur throughout the series. Drawing on the album now held at the Sun Yat-sen Library in Guangzhou and related sketches and landscapes in the Art Museum of CUHK, Dr. Bianchi demonstrated how Yip reworked traditional motifs to convey the gravity of war and famine, transforming them through his lived experience into poignant visual narratives of displacement.

At the end of the lecture, Dr. Bianchi emphasized on the cultural and historical significance of Yip’s work, situating it within broader discourses on memory, trauma, and the visual representation of humanitarian crises in modern Chinese art.