Photo by Wu, Yunan
GCHN-SHU 236
Immersive Narrative of
Chinese Monuments
Professor Lala Zuo & Wu-Wei Chen
Course Description
This course combines digital visualization technology with contemporary interpretations of the significance of Chinese monuments that identify and recall major events in Chinese history. Students will learn about the history, cultural significance, and scholarly knowledge of the monuments. Selected sites include timber-structure buildings, Daoist temples, and Buddhist art and architecture. Meanwhile, the course will cover immersive narrative knowledge, such as direct modeling for Chinese wooden carpentry structures, artifacts lighting, texturing, rendering, and virtual walk-through animation. Visualization and further utilizations will apply in the lectures and assignments to examine virtual environments’ authenticity and information management of the Chinese monuments. Students will create an immersive narrative using visualization tools to present a chosen monument site with its historical and cultural values in the final group project. Upon completing this course, students will have deepened their knowledge of the emerging field of the digital humanities through both a “digital” and a “humanistic” perspective and how digital humanities can be applied to visualize the history and culture of China.
Student
Works
Huangze Temple Immersive Narrative
By Yuan Huang, Yuhan Wang, Elli Halperin, Jessie Xia, Ella Zheng
Huangze Temple is located at the foot of Xishan Mountain, one kilometer west of Guangyuan City, with 57 caves and over 1200 statues. The statues are mainly distributed in the Cave of the Heart Sutra, the Big Buddha Building, and the Five Buddha Pavilions in the temple. Cave 01-14 (niche) and niche 53-57 (newly discovered in 2005 during the Huangze Temple renovation and expansion project) are located in the Heart Sutra Cave area, Cave 15-46 (niche) is located in the Big Buddha Building area, and niche 47-52 is located in the Five Buddha Pavilion area. The caves (niches) were first dug in the late Northern Wei Dynasty and continued through the Northern Zhou, Sui, and early Tang Dynasties, reaching their peak during the Gaozong and Wu Zhou periods, and then tending to decline. Important niches include Cave No. 45, the central pillar cave, and Cave No. 38, the three-wall, three-niche cave from the late Northern Wei Dynasty; Cave No. 15 from the Northern Zhou Dynasty; Cave No. 28, the large Buddha cave from the Sui Dynasty; and Caves No. 12 and 13 from Wu Zetian's parents, the warrior Nao and his wife Yang, from the Tang Dynasty's Zhenguan Period.