Join us Wednesday, February 20, at 6:00 pm, for a Dunkerley Dialogue with artist Yun-Fei Ji, whose work is in the Tang’s collection, and Skidmore Religious Studies Professor Ryan Overbey.

Dunkerley Dialogues are made possible by a generous gift from Michele Dunkerley, ’80.

This event is free and open to the public.

About the Participants

Ryan Richard Overbey is the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Assistant Professor in Buddhist Studies at Skidmore College. He works at the intersection of ritual and intellectual history in the Buddhist tradition, probing the close links between theory and practice, between philosophy and liturgy. As a philologist, his work focuses on the edition and interpretation of texts preserved in Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan in the first millennium CE. As a scholar and teacher in Religious Studies, he seeks to collapse distinctions between “premodern” and “modern,” between “elite” and “popular,” and between “West” and “East.” His teaching and research interests include Buddhism, Chinese religions, Indian religions, Tantra, esoteric traditions, ritual, theory and method in the study of religion, digital humanities. With David B. Gray, he co-edited Tantric Traditions in Transmission and Translation (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Yun-Fei Ji (b. 1963, Beijing, China) earned his BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and his MFA from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Separated from his parents at age 2, Ji grew up on a collective farm outside Hangzhou where he was entertained by his grandmother’s ghost stories and folk tales. As an artist, Ji says, “I use landscape painting to explore the utopian dreams of Chinese history, from past collectivization to new consumerism.” He received the 2006 American Academy Prix de Rome Fellowship and Residency and was the 2007 Artist-in-residence at the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art in London. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; the Rose Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham; the Peeler Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle; the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China; the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton; and the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu. Ji’s work has been exhibited in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the 2011 Lyon Biennale, the 2012 Biennale of Sydney, and the 2014 Prospect.3 in New Orleans. Yun-Fei Ji lives and works between New York, NY and Ohio.