The East Asia Program is honored to have Wu Hung, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, to give the 2025-2026 Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture: “Emperor Qianlong’s Peepshow Boxes: A Case of 18th-century Global Interaction in Art and Visual Culture.”

This is a hybrid event. To attend online, please register here with your cornell.edu email address: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_OKbtn2tEQ92ZW_FrQ_FaNw

Abstract: By focusing on a group of newly discovered visual materials—most notably a pair of peepshow boxes produced in Europe and China, respectively—this talk examines a series of transformations unfolding in eighteenth-century art and visual culture across geographic and cultural boundaries.

Bio: Wu Hung has published widely on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art. His interest in both traditional and modern/contemporary Chinese art has led him to experiment with different ways to integrate these conventionally separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives, as exemplified by his Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (1995), The Double Screen: Medium and Representation of Chinese Pictorial Art (1996), Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square: the Creation of a Political Space (2005), A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (2012), and Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (2016). Several of his ongoing projects follow this direction to explore the interrelationship between art medium, pictorial image, and architectural space, the dialectical relationship between absence and presence in Chinese art and visual culture, and the relationship between art discourse and practice.

Wu Hung is Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and sits on the boards and advisory committees of many research institutes and museums in the United States and China.

Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture

In 2014 on the 100th anniversary of Hu Shih's graduation from Cornell, EAP initiated an annual distinguished lecture in honor of the philosopher and statesman. Leading scholars of Chinese and East Asian studies are invited to speak on critical issues in their field of research. These lectures are archived as a resource for the Cornell community and beyond. Learn more about one of Cornell's most distinguished alumni, Hu Shih.

Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture videos and programs are permanently archived in the Cornell eCommons.About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

Join us for a virtual discussion on colonial collections in and on the Philippines featuring presentations by guest experts:

Cheryl Beredo, Director of Collections and Chief Curator, Yale University

Surveying several collections that can support the study of U.S. colonial archives of and on the Philippines, this presentation considers the conditions of their formation and explores their continuing dynamism. This talk examines how familiar government documents, national archives, and independent research collections in the United States and the Philippines not only chronicle the activities of the colonial state, but also the enduring work of both collection- and institution-building. It concludes with observations on possibilities to continue to build archives in this area today.

Aurélie Vialette, Associate Professor, Yale University

This presentation will discuss the colonial administrative archive of San Ramon penal colony (Zamboanga, Mindanao, the Philippines, 1869). The study of this archive provides an entrance to examine the transportation and labor of the imprisoned indigenous in the Philippines under colonial rule. It will cover the experiences working with archives, both in the Philippines and in Spain, and explain how to work with both databases and documents, showing specific examples from both countries.

This event is sponsored by Cornell University Library, the Cornell Southeast Asia Program, and the Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL).

Bartels World Affairs Lecture

In this year’s Bartels lecture, Ambassador Samantha Power examines the causes and consequences of dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While reductions in United States foreign assistance have inflicted harm on millions of people, the principal beneficiaries of the cuts, Power contends, are the People’s Republic of China and other governments that prefer to operate without scrutiny or accountability.

Join us as Power outlines a strategy for revitalizing a broad bipartisan coalition to support foreign assistance. To succeed in building resilient aid structures, politicians and stakeholders will need to demonstrate the effectiveness of aid programs to the public. U.S. resources should be used as leverage to secure new commitments from partner countries and mobilize additional investments from allied governments, the private sector, philanthropy, and members of the diaspora.

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Speaker

Ambassador Samantha Power served in the Biden-Harris administration as the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the world’s premier international development agency. She was the 28th U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama-Biden administration. Her first book, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

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About the Bartels World Affairs Lecture

The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Einaudi Center for International Studies. This flagship event brings distinguished international figures to campus each academic year to speak on global topics and meet with Cornell faculty and students, particularly undergraduates. The lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.