The first Chinese American Canadian Sinology Symposium was held on February 17th and 18th at the California State University (CSU), Sacramento, one of TKU’s sister university. The sponsors, apart from the host university, included TKU and the University of British Colombia of Canada, organized this first-time ever event on “Eastern and Western Culture and Their Living Aesthetics ”, signaling an increasing emphasis on the study of Sinology in the West.
This was also the first time for Sacramento Campus to host an international conference on Sinology so it was highly supported by its university with funding and other resources. With this backing, the conference organizers were able to invite more than 20 international scholars that included Kao Po-yuan, the Vice President for the Administrative Affairs of TKU and three other faculty members from the Chinese Department and the Graduate Institute of Chinese Linguistics and Documentation (GICLD) for participation and presentation.
One of them, Lu Kuo-ping, the chair of the Chinese Department, understands that Sinology has always been a point of keen academic interest internationally. This fact was brought home to him when he visited the University of California, Berkeley, a world center of Sinology Studies during this trip. The facilities, library collections and their research interests in this field all deeply impressed him. The faculty there also expressed their interests to him of having more scholars from Taiwan to visit them.
Other than the present and future of Sinology, the topics discussed at the symposium devoted to analyses on the differences between Eastern and Western cultures and the unique features of Chinese writing. The former focused on contemporary clothing and socio-cultural changes, which addressed what clothes symbolized about culture. For instance, Chinese modern clothing, Chung Shan suit and Mao’s suit for men, indicates a desire that longs for conformity, unity and simplicity, whereas the loose fitting contemporary western clothing demonstrates a spirit that is adventurous, open and free. The latter included a talk given by Chair Lu and his research student on the relationship between Chinese writing and modern visual arts. They used ancient pictographs found mainly on tortoise shells to form the basis of several modern woodcarvings to illustrate convincingly to other scholars the close link between Chinese writing system and art.
Vice President, Kao Po-yuan, also took this opportunity to discuss future projects with CSU. One of them being CSU requesting CICLD to help them with their library index system on Chinese books and the other being expanding exchange students and faculty program. Kao suggests that future students at Lanyang Campus will be ideal recruits for such a scheme. (Ying-hsueh Hu)
