On September 4, Dong Qiang, Dean of Yenching Academy gave a lecture titled “A Game of Chinese Characters with Kafka, Giacometti and Picasso: Exploring Modernization Potentials of Traditional Chinese Culture Through Sin0-Western Comparison.” Tailored to the new cohort, the lecture was first one in the China Studies Lecture Series for the 2026‒2027 academic year.
Interview Notes
Before the lecture, Prof Dong Qiang gave a behind-the-scenes video interview. He began by defining the essential difference between AI translation and human translation. The professor noted that as artificial intelligence has made remarkable progress in language processing, many leading AI figures believe AI has acquired the human capacity for language—an opinion Dong regarded as overly narrow and disagreed with. He argued that such an opinion is primarily based on alphabetic languages. However, a language is more than its alphabet—it is cultural, particularly with an ideographic language like Chinese. Dong believed that human translation will outperform AI translation for the foreseeable future, because a translator that has had firsthand experience of two cultures is able to discern the commonalities and nuanced differences between the languages of both cultures. At work, a translator naturally deliberates on how to understand the source text and how to express it in the target language. During the process, the translator challenges their own assumptions before reaching a final translation. A translator is like a ferryman who navigates through difficult waters and connects two different cultures. By contrast, AI translation relies on LLMs trained on massive amounts of text and outputs the translation without the nuanced thinking characteristic of human translation.
Prof Dong outlined why he brought Kafka, Giacometti and Picasso to dialogue with Chinese culture. He wanted to pose a conversation between the masters of Western literature and art through a game of Chinese-character cards and reveal the potential of traditional Chinese culture in the modern context. Kafka, master of modern literature, constructs a multilayered surreal space through language that feels credible and realistic. Giacometti’s sculptures are themselves three-dimensional works. Picasso created the illusion of three-dimensional space on his two-dimensional canvases. Chinese characters express meaning through spatial arrangements of basic strokes and components. The professor observed that language is not merely a tool to represent space; language and space are mutually correlated. Language is a way through which humans get to know the world and create the world.
Dean Dong expressed great expectations for Yenching Scholars. A doctoral dissertation may only be the first step into a specific research area. And a two-year master’s program in China Studies is too short to truly understand a rich culture like China—however, this program offers its students an opportunity to gain firsthand experience of the country and its culture. The dean conveyed a hope that the students would gain perceptual knowledge about China through a combination of classroom learning, field trips, social networking, and immersive experiences during their study at YCA. He believed that the experience at YCA would help the students see more possibilities in both academic and professional careers and offer them a broader perspective to observe the world even if they do not engage with China directly in the long run.
Review of the Lecture
Dean Dong began with a ten-minute opening. He has delivered the “First Lecture from the Dean” for four years in a row—each year a special theme for the new cohort. Dean Dong has carefully selected and prepared the topics. For the first year, Dong mapped the landscape of Chinese literature across the major regions in China to outline the country for his students. For the second year, he gave a guided tour to the students through traditional Chinese poetry across four seasons; using the lens of time, the dean and professor illustrated the inner world of the Chinese people and their reverence for nature. In the third year’s lecture, Dean Dong examined the evolution of Chinese culture over millennia from oracle bone inscription to the contemporary art of Zao Wou-ki. He was fully aware that for the international students who are new to Chinese culture and for the Chinese students who have never seen Chinese culture from such perspectives, his lectures might not be the most anticipated. However, the dean hopes that his lectures offer a new approach to Chinese culture. He intends to offer insight that will stay with students even after they leave YCA. His lectures are a gift that Yenching Scholars will carry with them for a lifetime.
This year’s lecture took a new angle. It examined the potential of Chinese culture in the modern context, through the lens of Sino-Western comparison. It is a significant topic that Dean Dong has been thinking about. However, he tried to approach this major topic that pertains to AI and human future in an accessible way—thus, this game 0f Chinese-character cards. All the cards were made by Dean Dong himself. The dean invited the Academy’s new cohort to this game engaging the works of Kafka, Giacometti and Picasso.
Prof. Dong used the selected Chinese characters for the Sino-Western comparison in his dialogue between the Western cultural dignitaries. The talk between two dogs in Kafka’s short story “Forschungen eines Hundes” (“Investigations of a Dog”) was juxtaposed with the Chinese character “狱” that is composed of “犭”, “讠(言)” and “犬”—figuratively two dogs talking to each other, which is intertextually linked with the dog’s perplexity depicted by Kafka. From the character “狱”, Dong turned to “忍”—that is graphically “a blood-dripping knife (‘刃’) over the heart (‘心’)”, producing a sense of pain and endurance. From this, we can see that Chinese characters feature a distinctive ideographic function.
The modern Western intellectual circles were fascinated by Chinese characters, the graphic form of which carries meaning and evokes emotional resonance. Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853‒1908), the author of “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” held Chinese characters in high esteem, arguing that Chinese characters are “shorthand pictures of the operations of nature.” For instance, the traditional Chinese character “東” (literally meaning “east”) was interpreted by Fenollosa as “the sun entangled in the branches of a tree”, a graphic image of the sun rising in the east. However, Prof. Dong noted that Fenollosa overstressed the pictographic aspect of Chinese characters and underestimated the prevalence of phono-semantic compounds. Nevertheless, Fenollosa was right about a major difference between alphabetic scripts and Chinese characters: Alphabetic scripts are arbitrary sign systems, while Chinese characters retain the primary link between language and the phenomenal world. Ezra Pound (1885‒1972) was heavily influenced by Fenollosa and frequently cited Chinese classics, characters and Confucian thoughts in his poem The Cantos. The poet held “If you can one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day” (James Legge’s translation) from The Great Learning as his personal motto.
The Western intellectual elite have long sought to free language from pure nonsense and to establish a direct link between language and reality. Since the time of Plato, Western intellectuals have regarded language as something more than a sign that imitates reality. In Plato’s Cratylus, Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus, hoped to see a natural fit between the sound of a word and the thing the word denotes. The symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854‒1891) assigned colors and sensory qualities to vowels. Charles Baudelaire (1821‒1867) put forth a theory of synesthesia, positing a relation between senses. Paul Claudel (1868‒1955), a French diplomat and poet, who lived in China and Japan for a long time, tried to distill the essence of the universe from Chinese characters and composed poems accordingly. What’s more, Western painters such as Vincent Van Gogh (1853‒1890) and Pierre Alechinsky (b. 1927) were fascinated by and drew inspirations from the Eastern painting and calligraphy. The mounting margin in traditional Chinese painting was then translated into modern paintings as an integral part of an art piece. Henri Michaux (1899‒1984) knew next to nothing of Chinese, but he invented signs that imitated the gesture of Chinese writing.
Prof Dong then turned to the theory of traditional Chinese art, known as “the same origin shared by traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy”. The term “bizhen”, literally “brush strokes in deployment”, was first seen in Bizhentu (Battle Formation of Brush-strokes), an essay on calligraphy attributed to Madam Wei (Wei Shuo, 272‒349) who was an early calligraphy mentor of Wang Xizhi (fl. in the mid-4th century). In the essay, analogies were drawn between brush strokes and battle deployment—the dash as an expanse of clouds, the perpendicular downstroke as a powerful crossbow released, and the dot as a rock falling from a high precipice. Wang Xizhi further developed Wei’s metaphors and described calligraphic writing as military operations. Brush strokes are not merely the depiction of physical forms; they gain the power and momentum of nature. Calligraphy is more than the form of written text; it is an art involving strength and rhythm. In Lidai minghua ji (Notes on Famous Paintings through the Ages), the Tang painter Zhang Yanyuan (815‒907) expounded the theory that traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy shared the same origin. In remote antiquity, “writing was created to convey meaning and painting was created to depict form”; writing and painting were originally two aspects of one and the same thing before separating into two specialized skills. The Yuan calligrapher and painter Zhao Mengfu (1254‒1322) applied calligraphic brush strokes to painting, arguing that “rocks are painted with flying-white and trees in seal script’s strokes, while bamboos are ‘written’ with the eight brush-strokes”.
The Qing painter Shi Tao (1642‒1708) brought traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy into the philosophical sphere by establishing “the one stroke” theory in Huayulu (Shi Tao’s Sayings on Painting). He claimed that “the one stroke” is the origin of all phenomena and that all strokes extend from “the one stroke”. “The one stroke” means much more than a physical line; figuratively, every stroke carries an artist’s reflection on and insight into the universe and life. Shi Tao rejected any blind imitation of past masters, arguing that the ancients’ methods cannot be entirely applicable to the present; the painter advocated painting with one’s own method and from one’s own heart. Dean Dong made comparisons between Shi Tao and modern artists Pan Tianshou (1897‒1971) and Jackson Pollock (1912‒1956). Pan Tianshou, the Chinese painter, and Jackson Pollock, the American abstract expressionist—roughly contemporaries, though an ocean apart—both engaged with art through the body’s force. Pan was the painter of control and Pollock the painter of action. Horace (65‒8 BCE) once juxtaposed poetry and painting; however, no ontological knowledge of the shared origin of painting and poetry emerged in the West—such ontological knowledge is a major divergence between Chinese and Western art traditions.
The Western scholarship was keen on locating one or more pictographic writing systems analogous to Chinese characters outside Chinese culture. Jean-François Champollion (1790‒1832) deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, causing a great sensation across Europe. Egyptian hieroglyphs, pictorial in origin, were closely bound to religious origins. Chinese characters constitute a logographic script, and pictographic representation is only one of the principles of Chinese character formation. The Chinese script has maintained an unbroken written tradition for millennia, evolving continuously and remaining in use to this day; it is a tradition of writing that has been closely intertwined with the Chinese outlook on the universe. A century after Champollion’s deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, oracle bone inscriptions were rediscovered, marking another milestone in the history of human civilization.
The second half of the lecture was focused on AI-related issues. Technologists hold that human language is merely an instrument and that 3D visual experience constitutes fundamental reality. With the rapid iteration of large video generation models, language seems to recede into the background, whereas AI appears to grasp the essence of human language. Prof Dong observed that present-day AI language models are largely built on alphabetic scripts. He noted that Chinese characters are an assemblage of graphic form, pronunciation, extended meaning, and cultural allusion, producing a rich cultural potential yet to be fully tapped by the AI language models based on alphabetic scripts. Furthermore, Chinese cultural ethos is rooted in Chinese characters.
Dean Dong also introduced “mêtis”, a practical, situational cunning in ancient Greek thought, different from Sophia (wisdom). Mêtis is a goddess of cunning and Zeus’s wife. According to legend, Zeus swallowed pregnant Mêtis, and Athena was later born from his head. The hero Odysseus is an embodiment of mêtis, demonstrated by his ingenuity in designing the Trojan Horse and escaping the Cyclops by calling himself “Otis,” meaning “no one.” Odysseus addresses his own heart: tetlathi dē, kradiē—“Endure, my heart.” The line is believed to be one of the earliest representations of interior speech in Western literature. The professor suggested a metaphor: AI is like Zeus [who seems to be swallowing humans] in this era. But he pointed that humans needn’t be frightened, and that humans should build up their own “Trojan Horse.” Dong believed that with the mêtis unique to humans, we have the ability to develop new thought and find a way out from the impasse created by AI. The legendary figure Cangjie was believed to create Chinese characters by observing the traces of birds and animals. He was like Odysseus’s counterpart in the East—another man known for practical insight.
During the Q&A session, Prof Dong gave suggestions on how to learn and understand Chinese characters. Beginners may start with picture-based learning and gain an understanding of radicals, side components, and the logic of character formation. Further than that, one needs to understand a word’s primary and extended meaning and seriously comprehend how context shapes meaning. Dong noted that dictionaries can only offer a basic understanding of Chinese, and that everyday expressions across different regions and occupations constitute different components of this living language. For the question on whether there is an artistic practice in China corresponding to the Surrealist automatic writing in the West, Prof Dong noted that in Daoist traditions and many other folk belief systems in China, there were “body language” cases that were similar to automatic writing. Yet, such Chinese cultural traditions served the established order and deeply bound up with civilization. For example, Shi Tao and Pan Tianshou both cherished the freedom of life in their artistic creation; however, neither allowed the unconscious to fully take the reins of creation. Thus, Chinese cultural traditions are different from Western automatic writing. For the issue on the boundary between AI and human language, Dean Dong observed that AI is capable of highly efficient language generation, but it has yet to grasp the cultural essence of Chinese characters or to acquire human situational understanding. He emphasized that technology is able to reconstruct the 3D world, but human mêtis—the intelligence to find a way out in an impasse—is and will remain a distinct trait AI cannot replicate.
The lecture focused on the potential and continuity of human cultures in the modern AI context from a perspective of Sino-Western comparison. Chinese characters serve as more than a tool of communication; they constitute a perceptive framework. The differences between Chinese and Western art are generated from the different underlying logic of Chinese and Western script systems. When we look at the strength of humanities represented by calligraphy, painting and writing, we need to reaffirm the irreplaceable spiritual traits of humans, instead of leaning on mere nostalgia. In the ingenious game of Chinese-character cards with Kafka, Giacometti and Picasso, the lecture presented the ethos of Chinese culture and its potential in the modern context. The thought-provoking lecture offered new perspectives to reexamine the relationship between language, culture and technology. It was more than an academic event; it posed a challenge to the current era: The untapped potential of Chinese language and culture deserves due attention in a time when AI is reshaping mainstream expression. We need to make comparisons between Chinese and Western cultures and safeguard the human ethos, experience, and freedom embodied in language. In this way, we can explore new possibilities of Chinese culture in the modern context of transformation.
