Art
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An American Artist in Beijing
One of the great things about being here is catching up with former students. And one of the great things about having taught for over twenty-five years is that some of those former students lead marvelously creative lives. A great… Continue reading
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Ai Weiwei, Zhuangzi, and Life at the Margins
Happy New Year! I saw the Ai Weiwei documentary, Never Sorry, again last night, and led a bit of a discussion about it afterwards. If you haven't seen it, you should. Alison Klayman does a great job presenting Ai's political… Continue reading
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Book News: Earlier Publication Date and Excerpt
And now for a spot of shameless self-promotion… It looks like my book – Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao: Ancient Chnese Thought in Modern American Life – will be coming out next month, as opposed to the previously… Continue reading
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Organizational Psychology Confirms Confucius: Helping Others is the Best Way to Help Yourself
Just saw this piece in the NYT: "Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?" This graf gets at the main idea: Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want… Continue reading
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Confucian Learning, or not
David Brooks has a piece in the NYT today, discussing a new book by Jin Li, Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West. Let me say right up front that I have not read the book (though I look forward… Continue reading
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Confucius in Church
That's the title of a piece in The Global Times a couple of days ago, reporting on a class, held under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in which Chinese Christians read The Analects and contemplate parallels… Continue reading
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Visualizing Dao
Bloomberg reviews an exhibition of Chinese art at the Grand Palaise in Paris, focusing on Daoism, with what seems to be particular attention to its religious manifestations. I recommend going to the museum's exhibition site. Video and text are in… Continue reading
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Man and Nature are One
It's a central concept of Chinese aesthetics: the unity of man and nature – 天人合一. And it comes up in a blog post by Evan Osnos over at The New Yorker. He is writing about Xu Bing, an artist,… Continue reading
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Sondheim on Creativity
子曰：“述而不作，信而好古，竊比於我老彭.” The Master said: "Transmitting insight, but never creating insight, standing by my words and devoted to the ancients: perhaps I'm a little like that old sage, P'eng. (7.1) Last Saturday I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Sondheim, a… Continue reading
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The art of emptiness
I didn't see this the other day in the NYT: sculptor Li Chen has a major show in Singapore. He is inspired by Buddhism and Taoism: “Li Chen is regarded as one of the leading Asian sculptors today,” said Tan… Continue reading
The Useless Tree 