Arts

This chapter discusses San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei zhuan, a Dōjin Game produced by a Taiwanese online public forum member in 2012, as an example of how Role-Playing Games in the Chinese context can provide alternative historical narratives of the Three Kingdoms period. The Dōjin Game San Guo Zhi Jiang Wei zhuan (JWZ) is a war RPG produced in 2012 by a member of the Taiwanese public forum hosted by the PTT of the National Taiwan University who used the pseudonym "ratchet." The game was modeled on the board game system and format of Sangokushi Sousouden (SSD), first released in 1999 by Koei & Co, the leading computer game producer of various series of Chinese and Japanese historical turnbased strategy games and RPGs such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga's Ambition, and Taikō Risshiden. Zheng Li, an expert on historical board games and RPGs, argued that the board game format of SSD "becomes the platform for derivative works of Chinese historical computer games." Among a dozen modified versions of SSD, including famous Chinese historical figures such as Lü Bu, Yue Fei, and others, JWZ is one of the most successful RPGs, attracting many fans of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, SSD, and online forum members in Taiwan, mainland China, and Hong Kong (Zheng 2014). The game provides a grey zone for its author, other programmers, and players to express their views on the current political affairs in Taiwan and mainland China through the reconstruction and reinterpretation of historical and fictional conversations between characters. Keywords Dōjin game-Role-Playing game-The romance of three kingdoms-Otaku culture-Taiwan

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour ESKA. © ESKA. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

This article interprets John Zorn's composition Interzone (2010) by comparing it to the eponymous place that is found throughout William S. Burroughs’ early novels. This is done through linking some of the ‘sound blocks’ that make up Zorn's composition to selected passages from Burroughs’ books as well as to specific events from the lives of Interzone's two dedicatees: Burroughs, and his associate, the writer and painter Brion Gysin. Zorn's disjointed, chaotic arrangement of sound blocks, and by extension their extra-musical associations, is then shown to emulate the dream-like structure of the phantasmatic place that is Interzone, which Burroughs created for his novels with the aid of Gysin's ‘cut-up’ method. Through these extra-musical connotations, it is demonstrated that Zorn's composition imitates Interzone's distortion of place; of internal and external space; and, most importantly, of time.

This review takes an interpretive look at contemporary composer John Zorn’s 2010 composition Liber Novus, inspired by C. G. Jung’s text of the same name (also known as The Red Book). The review shows how Zorn’s composition, dedicated to the Swiss psychoanalyst, reflects not only the content of Jung’s posthumously published book, but also the psychotherapeutic individuation method that he later developed and the alchemical symbology so influential to his work.

In a 1995 interview, contemporary American composer John Zorn stated: ‘I got involved in music because of film […] There’s a lot of film elements in my music’ (Duckworth, 1995, p. 451). Scholars and critics have since widely noted these cinematic elements, with emphasis being placed on Zorn’s genre of so-called ‘file card compositions’. Whilst these studies have primarily concentrated on how the arrangement of sound blocks – the disjointed segments of Zorn’s compositions – can be compared to cinematic montage, this article instead focusses on how sound blocks suggest the visual aspects of cinema. To delve deeper into the visuo-cinematic qualities of Zorn’s file card compositions, an idealised cinematic listener will be constructed, aided by various psychological, semiotic, philosophical and film theories. I will suggest that a listener occupying a hypnogogic state projects moving images, akin to those of cinema, onto what Bernard Lewin first called a ‘dream screen’. These projection...

Reviewed by Maurice Windleburn A 127-page prose poem, David Grubbs's Now That the Audience Is Assembled narrates an allnight concert featuring-as the subtitle and first page of the book explains-a 'musician's bruited first contact with an instrument we can't yet visualize and cannot imagine what it could be made to sound like' (p. 1). A composer and musician, as well as an academic and writer, Grubbs originally used material from this book for a performance in 2014, in which he was accompanied by percussionist Eli Keszler and electronic musician C. Spencer Yeh, as well as for the basis of a collaborative sound installation at the MIT List Visual Arts Centre in the same year. The book is a follow up to his previous, more academically orthodox publication, Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording, which addressed the peculiarities around recording experimental music seemingly ill-suited to recording. Grubbs's new book recounts a performance in which a musician-only ever called 'the musician'-gives an all-night concert on an instrument she is yet to encounter to an audience, many of whom gradually fall asleep. This instrument needs to first be assembled from a pile of miscellaneous rubble, whose objects range from menthol candy to car batteries, shoes to divination tools, and this construction constitutes a great deal of the musician's performance. An eventful night proceeds, that includes: shared breathing exercises between performer and audience; the intrusion of sounds external to the concert hall (including of subway trains-the hall being built over a subway line-and the wind, who enters the hall as a personification); and the dreams of sleeping audience members, which construct alternatives to the musician's actual performance.

Reviewed by Maurice Windleburn Joshua S. Walden's Musical Portraits is positioned in the subdiscipline of musicology that addresses interactions between music and the other arts-particularly literature and visual art-as valorised by recent scholars such as Richard Leppert and Simon Shaw-Miller. Walden's book convincingly argues that, while music may seem an underprivileged artform when it comes to human portrayal, the move of modernist art away from mimesis towards the depiction of interior or ephemeral qualities in fact made music the ideal medium for portraiture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Aside from modernist aesthetics, Walden also makes use of post-modern philosophies of the self to call into question the commonly held view that music's ability to depict and portray is impoverished. Relying on an understanding of the individual as ever-changing, multi-layered, fragmented and performed, rather than as concrete and self-determined, Walden argues that the temporality and multi-vocality inherent to music allows it to depict biographical changes throughout time and the various-sometimes contradictory-aspects of the self. This is placed in contrast to the more confined, static nature of visual portraiture. Walden also implements a postmodern framework when claiming that portraiture involves the artistic creation of a subject by the artist and not just the simple copying of an objective presence: that a sitter's identity exists partly as an interpretation within the minds of composers, performers and listeners. The privilege given to music by modernist aesthetics and post-modern conceptions of the self helps Walden determine the chronological scope of his book: from the 1950s to the present day. Walden's study also primarily addresses musical portraits of artistic figures, which allows

While a familiar term in art history, philosophy and cultural studies, ‘hyperrealism’ is rarely applied to music. This is despite Noah Creshevsky’s use of the term to describe his unique compositional process and aesthetic approach. A composer of electroacoustic music and founder of the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music, Creshevsky has described his musical hyperrealism as a ‘language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment (“realism”), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive (“hyper”)’. In this article, I summarise the ideas behind Creshevsky’s hyperreal music and compare them to philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s theorisation of the hyperreal. Numerous similarities between Creshevsky and Baudrillard’s ideas will be made evident. The first half of this article focuses on Creshevsky’s sampling of sounds as ‘simulacra’ and how the interweaving textures and melodies that Creshevsky makes out of these samples are similar to ‘simulations’....

In 1913, French composer Claude Debussy hosted Sufi mystic and (in Debussy's own words) "musician-philosopher" Hazrat Inayat Khan at his home, where they performed for each other their music. Taking this brief meeting as my opening, this paper compares Khan's "musical ontology" to similar beliefs held by the French Symbolists in Debussy's milieu. Khan's assertion that a vibratory, spiritual plane is the source of material, everyday existence is related to the beliefs of musicologist and bookstore owner Edmond Bailly; the "cenesthetic" poetics of Symbolists like Charles Baudelaire; Paul Gauguin's "musical" paintings; and Debussy's implementation of silence in his music.

This article likens experimental composer Luc Ferrari's musical work Far-West News to late-twentieth-century French travel literature. Made from recordings Ferrari took while journeying through the Southwestern United States, Far-West News is understood here as a "sound hunt" for exotic sounds-a search for a difference in the cultural entropy of latetwentieth-century globalism. Ferrari's piece offers an incentive to think about listening as an integral part of the travel experience.

This chapter furthers recent reappraisals of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s music philosophy, working against Carolyn Abbate’s well-known claim that Jankélévitch’s ‘drastic’ thought opposes all hermeneutic methods. To do so, I illustrate how hermeneutic interpretation is itself a drastic act of doing, taking Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and outlining its drastic components through the prism of Abbate’s Jankélévitch-inspired terms. I then reconsider Jankélévitch’s music philosophy in the light of the drastic aspects of Gadamer’s thought, offering some surprising points of compatibility between the two thinkers. I show how for both philosophers, musical interpretation is a temporal event, one that develops as an interplay between listener and music, perception and preconception. Additionally, both Gadamer and Jankélévitch consider this interpretive process as potentially infinite, given music’s ineffability.Towards the chapter’s end I shift focus slightly, to claim that pr...

This literature review explores psychotherapeutic and Buddhist psychological approaches to non- attachment as the means of working with attachment and identification. Although both psychotherapy and Buddhist psychology are united in the view that attachments and identification are central to suffering, differences are evident in the way in which each discipline views the role of attachment and identification in terms of their contribution to suffering, and also in the way in which a release from such suffering might be facilitated. Psychotherapy views identification and attachment as having both positive and negative attributes in their contribution to the development of a healthy sense of self. In contrast, Buddhist psychology views all identification as problematic as a result of its contribution to the creation of fixation with a deluded sense of self. Whilst not dismissing the value of attachment, Buddhist psychology does, however, view the motivations behind an individual’s attachments as the cause of suffering. In this context, particular attention is paid to identifications with the self, with past or with others that harm the client’s health and wellbeing. The writer suggests that helping clients to let go of fixed identifications (or attachments) will help them to create space for a new, freer and healthier experience of self and other within the psychotherapeutic relationship and beyond. This process of letting go (non-attachment) may have particular relevance in regard to how psychotherapists might work toward the alleviation of client’s suffering through the alteration of their mental experience of self, other, and objects (identification), and the reduction of their fixation with or ”clinging” to emotional content (attachment). It is in this way that Buddhist psychology offers the possibility of augmenting psychotherapy in the resolution of client suffering (Dockett, Dudley-Grant & Bankart, 2003) through assisting the individual to move beyond their notion of self, into the freedom of selflessness, encounter with the other, and non-attachment.

Hong Kong has cornered itself by promulgating segregation in kindergartens, primary schools and secondary schools. This could have transpired unwittingly, but segregation is thriving well and unmanaged in the treatment of ethnically non-Chinese students in various areas of our education system.

This paper explores the evolution of conceptions of national identity in contemporary Chinese fashion by analyzing Chinese designers and their work over the last 30 years. It focuses on the post-Mao years of “opening up and reform” since 1978 and draw evidences from a content analysis of published reports and interviews with a selection of established and emerging designers. This study shows that contemporary Chinese fashion designers still hark to a notion of “Chineseness”. This invocation of an essential and identifiable “Chinese” quality is a result of China’s nationalistic education curriculum but is also a mechanism by which Chinese fashion designers seek to gain rapid recognition and a distinctive place in the international community. This distinctive identity facilitates their competitiveness on the global fashion stage. This article shows that conceptions of national identity in Chinese fashion have evolved from the promotion of concrete “traditional Chinese” symbols to more amorphous ideas about “the Chinese spirit”. This spirit is manifest in two particular styles of recent years. First, the works of the “Zen” designers that seek to invoke “Oriental” ideas of peacefulness, calm and harmony by adopting pale or neutral colors, natural fabrics and naturally flowing shapes. Second, the designers that invoke images of “modern” China, either by sourcing inspiration from contemporary daily life or rejuvenating traditional Chinese elements with a modern look. This paper argues that the evolution from the use of traditional Chinese symbols to the Chinese spirit within the fashion design world signifies a new form of Chinese nationalism: instead of delivering the Chinese culture in an explicit, direct and exterior form, Chinese designers have switched to convey their unique “Chineseness” in a subtle, in-direct and hidden form.  Such evolution is a result of modernization, hybridization and competition between the twin tensions of nationalism and the globalization.

Key words: Chinese Fashion; National Identity; Nationalism; Chinese Design; Chinese Culture