Professor Eugene Yuejin Wang has been Abby Aldrich
Rockefeller Professor of Asian
Art, Department of History of
Art and Architecture at Harvard
University since 2005. He studied at Fudan University, Shanghai, and Harvard University where he received his PhD in 1997. He has had a distinguished academic career, teaching at Harvard since
1997 and at the University of
Chicago from 1996-97.
He is the recipient of many grants and fellowships including the
Guggenheim Fellowship, Charles
A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, and Getty Collaborative Grant, all in 2005.
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Professor Wang has widely published in both English and Chinese on Chinese art and visual culture.
The range of subjects include bronze mirrors, sarcophagus carvings, Buddhist sculptures, cave-shrine murals, landscapes, book illustrations, modern Chinese painting and cinema.. His most recent publication is Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005), which received an academic achievement award from Japan. He is also the art history associate editor of Encyclopedia of
Buddhism (2004).
His current researches address the question of why and how images work in the dark, i.e., in tombs, caves, and crypts, where they were not primarily to be seen, but installed there to map out the transformation of the body in the imaginary cosmos. His research also explores how Chinese pictures speak to momentous, and at times traumatic, historical circumstances, often sublimating rather than
“reflecting” them.
In 1987, Chinese archaeologists uncovered a crypt in the Famen Monastery near Xi’an, last sealed in 873 CE. The crypt yielded four sets of reliquaries donated by the Tang emperors to enshrine the Buddha’s finger bones. Most notable among them is an eightfold set of nesting reliquary boxes, arranged in the manner of Russian dolls, featuring an elaborate cryptic decorative program. Was it a coincidence that the last interment of the reliquaries occurred around the time of the emperor’s death? Who engineered the interment and how? What do the reliquaries tell us about the imperial politics of the time? Unpacking the nesting caskets and thinking outside the boxes, Professor Wang’s lecture will decode the encrypted message embedded therein.

Dr Lee Seng Tee was born in 1923 in Singapore. He is a director of the Lee Group of Companies – Lee
Rubber Co., Lee Pineapple Co., Singapore
Investments, and the Lee Foundation, in the Republic of Singapore. He is a graduate of the Wharton School,
University of Pennsylvania. He has had a life-long association with tertiary education. His father, Dr Lee
Kong Chian, was Chancellor of the University of
Singapore from 1962-1965. Lee Seng Tee has made many benefactions to Academic and Research institutions worldwide. In addition to sponsoring the annual lecture in Asian Art & Archaeology at the
University of Sydney, Dr Lee generously supports the work of the Sydney University team at Angkor.
Dr Lee has supported the Sino-Himalayan Bamboo
Project at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK, the
Science and Civilisation in China Project, Needham
Research Institute, University of Cambridge, and libraries at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge;
Oriel College, University of Oxford; the Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford and the Institute of
Advanced Studies, University of Bristol.
Dr Lee has established seventeen S.T. Lee Annual Lectures worldwide at: American Academy of Arts
& Sciences; Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Institute for International Studies,
Stanford University; School of Arts & Sciences, University of Pennsylvania; Princeton University; The
British Academy; University of Cambridge; All Saints College & Oriel College , University of Oxford;
Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany; University of Alaska-Fairbanks; Victoria University of
Wellington, N Z; University of Sydney & Australian National University, Australia; Universidad
Adolfo Ibañez, Santiago, Chile; University of Economics, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Lee Seng Tee’s contributions to scholarship have been acknowledged by the award of an Honorary
Research Associate of the Faculty of Arts in the University of Sydney; an Honorary Fellowship of
Wolfson College, University of Cambridge; the Distinguished Service Award of the Wharton Alumni
Association; an Honorary Fellowship of the British Academy; a Doctor of Technology, Asian
Institute of Technology, Thailand; an Honorary Fellowship, School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London; a Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences; a Companion of the Guild of Benefactors, University of Cambridge; an Honorary
Fellowship of Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals; Membership of the
Advisory Committee, East Asia Institute, University of Cambridge; an Honorary Fellowship of the
Needham Research Institute, University of Cambridge; an Honorary Fellowship at Oriel, University of Oxford and membership of the University’s Court of Benefactor’s, University of Oxford.