WANG Ching-shueng (Cing-Shueng) has produced lacquer art for over 60 years and is the bearer of the title “National Treasure of Taiwan”. Mr. Wang was born in Taiwan in 1922 and started lacquer training as a teenager at the Taichung School for the Arts. He continued advancing in lacquer studies in Japan at the Tokyo Fine Arts School, currently called Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. He started The Meiyen Arts and Craft Company at his hometown of Taotun in the early 1960s. The company produced a variety lacquer products for domestic use and international exports for two decades. In recent years, Mr. Wang has devoted his energy in producing unique art pieces including lacquer paintings and sculptures. Under his tutelage, two of his sons, Wang Hsien-min and Wang Hsien-chih, have become accomplished lacquer artists in their own right. Even as his age has passed ninety, Mr. Wang dedicates six to eight hours in his art studio each day.

Pritam BHARTWAN is a distinguished cultural artist from the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. He is a singer, composer, lyricist, and specialist on the folk music of Uttarakhand. Mr. Bhartwan plays many of the traditional instruments in the region (dhol-damaun, hurka-thali), and he is also a hereditary healer who leads possession ceremonies (jagar). Since 1992, he has recorded over 50 commercial albums and has given over 150 concerts in India and abroad, including the United States, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and Germany.

Stefan FIOL is an assistant professor of musicology at teh University of Cincinnati. Dr. Fiol has conducted ethnomusicological research in India, and shorter fieldwork projects in Chile, Paraguay and Zimbabwe. His current research investigates the development of regional music industries in the central Himalayas, and the ways that this music both sustains and undermines attempts to delineate regional political and cultural movements within India.

Theodore LEVIN is the Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. His research and advocacy activities focus on the role of arts and culture in promoting and strengthening civil society in countries where it is endangered or still emerging. During an extended leave from Dartmouth, he served as the first executive director of the Silk Road Project, founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Currently Dr. Levin serves as Senior Project Consultant to the Aga Khan Music Initiative, and as chair of the Arts and Culture sub-board of the Open Society (Soros) Foundations.

Director

Jennifer GOODLANDER is an Assistant Professor in the UK Department of Theatre. She earned an MFA at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in Asian performance and directing, and a Ph.D. from Ohio University focusing on theatre and performance studies with a certificate in Women’s Studies and concentration in Southeast Asian Studies. Her dissertation research focused on women and traditional performance in Bali for which she went through the training and ritual initiations to become a practicing dalang, or puppet-master. In New York City and regionally she has worked extensively as a director and teacher with a special emphasis on new plays and physically based performance. Goodlander also has experience incorporating Asian theatre into innovative productions of plays by Western writers.

Chinese Arts Reception

Kuo-Huang HAN (event organizer and ensemble director) Ph.D., Northwestern University, and Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus, Northern Illinois University recently completed a four year visiting teaching fellowship with the UK Asia Center and UK School of Music where he helped establish the UK World Music Program. He has been teaching world music, ethnomusicology, and Chinese and Southeast Asian instruments for many years. He has also conducted many workshops throughout the country and in Asia.

Celia FAN (painter) When she was young, Ms. Fan took individual lessons on traditional Chinese brush painting with masters in Taiwan. The genres included lady figure painting under Ch'in CHANG and landscape painting under Cheng KING. After moving to Chicago, she took up flower and bird painting lessons under He-pei LIU.

Jinhai ZHANG (calligrapher) With fond interest, Mr. Zhang started to learn calligraphy in middle school. Later, he took calligraphy lessons from Professor Qiuye WANG of the Dept. of Fine Arts at Shanghai Tongji University. Since then he has since persevered in learning and practicing calligraphy, and has mastered the skills of writing in all the six basic styles of Chinese calligraphy, namely, the Seal Style, the ancient Official Clerical Style, the Regular Script (also known as the Standard Script), the Cursive Script, the Semi-Cursive Script and the Tablet Script.

Huun Huur Tu comes from the former Soviet Autonomous Republic of Tuva, a sparsely settled region 2,500 miles east of Moscow, situated at the center of Asia, north of Mongolia. Their indigenous music highlights rare instruments and preserves what is arguably some of the world's oldest forms of music making. The best known genre of Tuvan musi, xoomei (throat-singing), comprises what one might call a lexicon of musical onomatopoeia in which natural sounds are mimetically transformed into musical representations. As they began touring in the West seventeen years ago, Huun Huur Tu almost single-handedly introduced the outside world to the boundless wealth of Tuvan traditions, thanks in great part to their superior musicianship.

Khovalyg An extremely talented, self-taught overtone singer, Khovalyg worked as a shepherd until the age of 21. He settled in Kyzyl and started teaching throat singing and igil. A co-founder of Huun-Huur-Tu, he left the State Ensemble in 1993 to devote his attention to the newly formed quartet. Covering a range from tenor to bass, Khovalyg is particularly known for his unique rendition of the khoomei and kargyraa singing styles.
Sayan Bapa, child of a Tuvan father and Russian mother, grew up in the industrial town Ak-Dovurak. He received his musical training in Kislovodsk, Northern Caucasus, where he played fretless bass in a Russian jazz-rock band for several years. In the early 1990s he returned to Tuva to study his roots, and became a member of a folk-rock band, performing traditional Tuvan music on electric instruments. A co-founder of Huun-Huur-Tu, Bapa is a versatile string instrumentalist, and performs on the doshpuluur, igil and acoustic guitar. As a vocalist he is currently specializing in the kargyraa style.
Radik was born in the Ovur area of The Republic of Tuva, near the border with Mongolia. He has been interested in studying and performing folk music since childhood, and he learned throat-singing from his grand-dad. He later graduated from the Chyrgal-ool Arts School (Kyzyl), where he had been studying igil. He participated in various Tuvan rock and folk collectives. Radik currently teaches igil at the Kerndenbilija Arts School of The Republic of Tuva. He joined Huun-Huur-Tu in 2005.
Alexei Saryglar joined the ensemble in 1995 to replace Alexander Bapa. He completed his musical training in Ulan Ude as a percussionist for classical and popular music, and became a member of the large Russian state ensemble 'Siberian Souvenir'. A multi-talented performer, Saryglar makes his mark as a sygyt singer, and his expertise with traditional Tuvan percussion and string instruments naturally extends into the art of piano playing.

Lakshmi SRIRAMAN is a performer and dance teacher based in Lexington. Being passionate about sharing her love for dance, Lakshmi founded ‘Shree School of Dance’ to provide Bharatanatyam education in Kentucky. She is currently a student of Priyadarsini Govind, one of the leading Bharatanatyam artists in the world.

Aniruddhan VASUDEVAN is a performer, activist and writer based in Chennai, India. He has studied with Guru Chitra Visweswaran, a dancer and teacher of great importance. Aniruddhan has traveled and performed widely, including in the U.S. As the Director of The Shakti Resource Center, Chennai, he is currently engaged in setting up support and advocacy services for LGBT people in this region.

ZHANG FuQuan is an award-winning photographer originally from Xian, Shaanxi Province of China. He is a retired staff photographer for the Northwest Institute of Research of Hydroelectric Power but apart from photos related to hydropower engineering, Mr. Zhang loves to take artistic photos of people in different cultural settings and landscapes. His photos have been exhibited in Japan, Macau, Hong Kong, the United States, and many cities in China. In 2004, his work reached the final round of competition and received “Outstanding Photography” award at the International Photographers Association Conference at Washington DC.

Bruce WILSON was born in Auckland and grew up in everything but a dance background. He taught drama in high school for many years then spent five years teaching dance with the Linkz Dance Group which toured locally, nationally, and then to both Australia and the USA. A sidestep into the corporate world of Tokyo lasted several years until in 2001 he became artistic director, choreographer and guest instructor of Seeress Art and Dance in Kanazawa Japan.

Chika UTSUNOMIYA studied classical ballet with Hiroko Tatewaki, and studied contemporary dance and music at Tokyo Gakugei University (master course 1982-1984), and creative dance with Masami Kuni in 1978-1989 creating and performing several dance pieces. In 1989 she moved to England to explore dance at Goldsmith’s College, Laban center for movement & Dance. There she worked and performed with Laura Guarnera & Danal Guy as a dancer and a composer until 1993. After coming back to Japan in 1993, she began work at the Academy of Performing Arts. During this period she started to dance solo.
Since 1997 she has been living in Kanazawa, directing at the SEERESS Art & Dance Space and performing Japanese Traditional Mai-dance .

Joel FELDMAN lives and works in Lexington. He moved to Kentucky in 2005, after retiring as the head of the printmaking program at the School of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He currently teaches a projects course at the University of Kentucky’s Art Department. Feldman works in a variety of media. Besides his current body of work, he is also known for woodcuts, drawings, sculptures and the ongoing series entitled “Annotated Landscapes” photographed from sets created in the studio.

Eugene WANG is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University. His book, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005) has received the Academic Achievement Award in memory of the late Professor Nichijin Sakamoto, Rissho University, Japan. Dr. Wang is the art history associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (New York, 2004). His thirty or so published articles cover a wide range of subjects, including ancient bronze mirrors, Buddhist murals and sculptures, reliquaries, scroll paintings, calligraphy, woodblock prints, architecture, photography, and films.