The Asian Studies Center is pleased to present our new Asia Pop Series where we explore a different facet of Asian popular culture. In this first year, we will focus on the global legacy of Asian popular music including K-pop, Idol Pop, Canto and Mando Pop.The talk starts at 5:30 pm in 125 Frick Fine Arts Auditorium.
The University of Pittsburgh has joined a growing list of American universities that have shuttered a Chinese language and culture program sponsored by the Chinese government.
Ariel Armony, Pitt’s vice provost for global affairs and director of the University Center for International Studies, said the university closed its Confucius Institute after the U.S. State Department issued “unwelcome and unexpected” guidance regarding the visas of 15 Chinese scholars who were scheduled to travel to Pittsburgh this fall to operate the program.
A Pitt spokesman said the university was informed it was out of compliance with J-1 visa regulations regarding interns at the Confucius Institute and was not able to make modifications in time for the fall semester.
The steel industry has historically held a central place in the development of all modern industrial economies. Supporting the rise of East Asia in the postwar world, the rise of resource import-dependent steel industries in Japan, Korea and China has emerged alongside export-oriented mining industries in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India and South Africa, etc., and steel products exported to the rest of world. These processes formed the global production network of East Asia’s iron and steel industry. This talk will address its global environmental history from four aspects: The development of iron and steel industry in postwar East Asia; East Asia’s iron ore and coal import and the environmental impacts of resource extraction in the producing areas; environmental consequences of iron processing in East Asia; East Asia’s Steel product export and its recycling in the consuming areas.The talk runs from 12:00 to 1:30 in 4430 Posvar Hall (map) and is free and open to the public.
In this funny, uplifting tale based on an actual lie, Chinese-born, U.S.-raised Billi (Awkwafina) reluctantly returns to Changchun to find that, although the whole family knows their beloved matriarch, Nai-Nai, has been given mere weeks to live, everyone has decided not to tell Nai Nai herself. To assure her happiness, they gather under the joyful guise of an expedited wedding, uniting family members scattered among new homes abroad. As Billi navigates a minefield of family expectations and proprieties, she finds there’s a lot to celebrate: a chance to rediscover the country she left as a child, her grandmother’s wondrous spirit, and the ties that keep on binding even when so much goes unspoken. With The Farewell, writer/director Lulu Wang has created a heartfelt celebration of both the way we perform family and the way we live it, masterfully interweaving a gently humorous depiction of the good lie in action with a richly moving story of how family can unite and strengthen us, often in spite of ourselves.It plays at the Waterworks Cinema, the AMC in Mt. Lebanon, the Squirrel Hill Manor, and the Tull Family Theater in Sewickley through Wednesday and remains at the latter two on Thursday. Tickets are available online. It will then play at the Row House Cinema in Lawrenceville from September 6 through 12 as part of the Amazing New Directors series.
Exhibited in Pittsburgh for the first time, Materializing Memory presents the work of five young Chinese artists, all born after 1980. These artists are part of China’s balinghou and jiulinghou (post-1980 and post-1990) generations. Unlike earlier practitioners, they came of age following the dramatic economic and cultural reforms of 1978. Through the medium of video art, these artists explore contemporary Chinese society during a period of profound technological and urban transformation. Their work is deeply informed by the Internet, rapid economic development, international communication and exchange, as well as opportunities to earn advanced degrees abroad. These videos document personal and collective experiences. Some record individual feelings of boredom and isolation, while others investigate broader social contradictions and complexities within China and beyond. Together, these works illustrate the plasticity of contemporary experience, and ask what it means to remember during a time when progress accelerates the urge to forget.The exhibition's opening reception is scheduled from 5:00 to 7:00 pm on September 5; the gallery is open from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm weekdays in the Frick Fine Arts Building in Oakland (map).
Korean-American pop singer named simply Ronin [. . .] will hop on stage Thursday to sing a couple songs at the weekly open mic/jam night at Mario’s Dockside Grille in Bridgewater. These jam nights are co-hosted by Ambridge rocker David Granati, brother of percussionist Rick Granati, who’s friends with Vulpis, hence the local tie.He is also performing at Hambone's tonight at 7:00 pm.
Ronin might treat his Beaver County audience to his single “Chemical Smile,” now being played by 15 Top-40/pop radio stations from San Francisco to Atlantic City.
Miyazaki's films are above all visually enchanting, using a watercolor look for the backgrounds and working within the distinctive Japanese anime tradition of characters with big round eyes and mouths that can be as small as a dot or as big as a cavern. They also have an unforced realism in the way they notice details; early in ''Totoro,'' for example, the children look at a little waterfall near their home, and there on the bottom, unremarked, is a bottle someone threw into the stream.It will play locally at the AMC Loews Waterfront and the Cinemark theaters in Monroeville, North Hills, Pittsburgh Mills, and Robinson. The August 25 and 28 shows are dubbed in English and the August 26 show is in Japanese with English subtitles. Tickets are available online.
The movie tells the story of two young sisters, Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe. As the story opens, their father is driving them to their new house, near a vast forest. Their mother, who is sick, has been moved to a hospital in this district. Now think about that. The film is about two girls, not two boys or a boy and a girl, as all American animated films would be. It has a strong and loving father, in contrast to the recent Hollywood fondness for bad or absent fathers. Their mother is ill; does illness exist in American animation?
Discover Cambodia’s lost surf rock scene through the eyes of a young Cambodian American woman and her father, a Khmer Rouge survivor who begrudgingly returns to his home country for the first time in thirty years. This thrilling story toggles back and forth in time, as father and daughter face the music of the past. An intimate rock epic about family secrets set against the dark chapter of Cambodian history. Featuring actor/musicians who perform the show’s mix of contemporary Dengue Fever hits and classic Cambodian oldies.There has been some interest in Cambodian surf rock music in recent years, with the 2014 documentary Don't Think I've Forgotten playing at the Row House Cinema, Hollywood Theater, and Melwood Screening Room in 2015 and 2016. Dengue Fever has played in Pittsburgh, too, most recently as an opening act in 2017.
