UMAG Lecture Series 2026
UMAG 講座系列 2026

Date:  17 Sep 2026 - 27 Nov 2026

The UMAG Lecture Series 2026 features five talks that consider the history of gardens, architecture, and landscapes in a global context. Professor Xu Zhu focuses on Xuanzang’s mural program, which depicted the eastward transmission of Buddhism along the corridors of the central cloister of Ximing Monastery, and traces its subsequent influence in Nara, Japan. Dr. Phillip Bloom introduces Liu Fang Yuan at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in Southern California, as well as several of the exhibitions that its curators have mounted to share Chinese garden culture with diverse audiences. Professor Giles Knox examines two exceptional small garden views by Diego Velázquez at the Villa Medici during his 1629–1630 trip to Italy, arguing that rather than being anomalous outliers, they “fit” within Velázquez’s broader oeuvre and highlight his distinctive relationship with nature. Professor Cole Roskam discusses a transitional moment in the history of colonial Hong Kong’s Surveyor General’s Office (1844–1883), when bureaucratic challenges and the shifting demands of the British metropole prompted a transition from the survey department’s founding responsibilities into what would become the Public Works Department in 1883. Professor Wang Lianming invites us to look anew at the ruins of the Qianlong Emperor’s European palaces and argues for a Qing political landscape that transcends ideological divisions and cultural oppositions.