Staging Tianxia: The Silk Road and Dunhuang Expressive Arts

A lecture by Lanlan Kuang 鄺藍嵐

Via Zoom

https://berkeley.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_r2-F1_ENSWuNrViEyuBpgA#/registration

The ancient Silk Road formed an intercontinental network connecting Europe and Asia, facilitating vibrant exchanges of cultural traditions across Eurasia. Extending from Asia to Anatolia and from Thrace to Europe during the Middle Ages, this network profoundly impacted global cultures through the transfer of performing art styles, creating rich and complex adaptations across interconnected nodes. Drawing from Lanlan Kuang’s recent monograph Staging Tianxia: Dunhuang Expressive Arts and China’s New Cosmopolitan Heritage (Indiana University Press, 2024), this talk presents the first major English-language study of how ancient Silk Road performance traditions are being strategically “staged” to articulate a new Chinese worldview. The Dunhuang bihua yuewu (Dunhuang mural dance-music) genre has emerged as one of China’s most potent symbols of multicultural artistic heritage. Kuang’s study analyzes how contemporary cultural agents stage these expressive arts as a performative phenomenon of what she theorizes as a “staged Chinascape” (Zhongguo jingguan 中國景觀)—a fluid, open conceptual landscape emerging from the revived ancient Chinese concept of tianxia 天下 (all under heaven). Offering insights into the intersection of heritage, performance, and soft power in twenty-first-century China through examining the Silk Road themed performing art traditions in classical and modern contexts, the author invites discussion on how these performance practices have gained renewed significance since China’s 2013 Belt and Road Initiative, transforming ancient Silk Road imagery into a contemporary vehicle for articulating an alternative vision of world order within China’s evolving cultural diplomacy and cosmopolitan heritage discourse.

Lanlan Kuang 鄺藍嵐 is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida. She holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University, Bloomington, and was awarded a Fulbright in 2008-2009. Specializing in Asian arts and humanities, aesthetics, and heritage studies, Kuang’s research focuses on cultural policies and their impacts on socioeconomic and artistic developments. Her first monograph, Dunhuang Performing Arts: The Construction and Transmission of “China-scape” in the Global Context, is published by the Chinese Social Sciences Academy (CSSA)’s Social Sciences Academic Press (SSAP) in 2016. Her second monograph, Staging Tianxia: Dunhuang Expressive Arts and China’s Cosmopolitan New Heritage, is published by Indiana University Press in 2024. Kuang serves on the Florida State Department’s Florida Folklife Council and the editorial boards of scholarly journals and book series internationally. For more information, please visit her website, https://lanlankuangofficial.pub/