Chinese Art Media Lab Open Studios

Please join Harvard’s newly established Chinese Art Media Lab for a showcase of works-in-progress. This night of R&D, debuting at Harvard’s new Annex space, offers the public an exciting opportunity to peek behind-the-scenes into CAMLab’s cutting-edge experiments in multimedia, visual art, architecture, and design. CAMLab is founded by Professor Eugene Wang, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art. You can reserve a spot here.

In the 16th century play Peony Pavilion, a young girl falls asleep in a garden. She begins a passionate romance in her dream that, in waking life, becomes an obsession that ultimately consumes her. Dream and reality become fatally entangled: she leaves her self-portrait in a garden, to be picked up, impossibly, by the lover she met in her dream. Conjuring the imaginary world of The Peony Pavilion, this immersive exhibition creates a sequence of spaces in which projected images, architectural components, and objects create a world that straddles reality and illusion. Drawing upon the historical synergy between architecture and theater, the exhibition embeds the narrative of The Peony Pavilion into a deconstructed vernacular house, inviting visitors into the imaginary dimension of Chinese architecture.

The epic multi-channel installation To The Moon  charts the spiritual journey of eminent 20th century painter Liu Guo-song. The film spans Liu’s childhood in wartime China in the 1930s to a momentous artistic breakthrough that coincided with the iconic Apollo moon landing. Alongside a global revival of interest in Chan/Zen Buddhism, Liu’s work ushered Chinese landscape painting into the Space Age and a new cosmic dimension, pointing the way toward a distinct Chinese mode of abstract painting. Using the medium of film, To The Moon creates a dazzling mental theater of Liu’s inner world that reveals his search for a spiritual homeland and means of transcendence.