About the Project
Many strengths. One shared story.
Catalyst was conceived in August 2026 by Professor John Erni, the new Dean of Arts at Lingnan University. Recognizing the Faculty’s immense intellectual and creative potential, he saw an opportunity to bring its many strengths into sharper focus through a more unified message—one that connects achievements across departments and centres and communicates what makes Lingnan Arts distinctive.
The project began with a simple premise: the Faculty’s accomplishments deserve to be understood not only as individual successes, but as expressions of a shared identity and public purpose. Bringing together scholarship, educational innovation, creative practice, and community engagement, Catalyst tells a collective story of how the arts and humanities deepen understanding, enrich cultural life, and enable meaningful change.
Its name captures that ambition. The arts and humanities do more than interpret the world: they cultivate the critical judgement, imagination, historical understanding, and ethical reflection needed to shape its future. From human-centred approaches to A.I. and other emerging technologies to the preservation and reinterpretation of living heritage, Catalyst reveals connections across disciplines, generations, and communities. Rooted in Hong Kong and engaged with the Mainland, Asia, and the wider world, it celebrates the contributions of the Faculty’s scholars, teachers, students, alumni, and partners.
The Catalyst booklet gives this shared vision a tangible form. This webpage carries it forward as a living collection of stories, achievements, and milestones—celebrating the Faculty’s legacy while making room for new voices, collaborations, and possibilities. Together, they offer more than a record of accomplishment: they express a Faculty discovering the full strength of its collective voice.
Dean's Message
The Work of the Arts and Humanities
As Lingnan University marks its 60th anniversary, this project is offered as both a celebration and an invitation: a celebration of the work through which Lingnan Arts has helped shape cultural, intellectual, and public life, and an invitation to readers to see how the arts and humanities continue to matter in a time of rapid technological, social, and global change. Under the theme Woven in Time, Alive in Culture, these pages introduce the distinctive character of our Faculty—its commitments, its achievements, and the forms of inquiry, creativity, and public engagement through which it serves Hong Kong and the wider world.
Culture is made in time, gathered in languages and images, rituals and archives, works of art and modes of thought. It is carried onward—and made newly alive—through reading, translation, performance, research, and conversation.
At Lingnan Arts, we attend carefully to these layers of inheritance as materials that we continually revisit and remake. We ask how the past persists in the present, how memories travel across generations and borders, and how new technologies, social forms, and creative practices alter the ways we see and inhabit the world.
Our work moves across Chinese literary and cultural traditions, film and digital arts, philosophy and history, translation, language, and cultural studies. In each field, we attend closely to texts, images, places, and lived experience, while pursuing questions that reach across disciplines, cultures, and borders. This booklet is meant to guide readers through that shared endeavor: not simply by recording accomplishments, but by showing the values that connect them—critical inquiry, creative practice, and public understanding.
To be woven in time is to recognize that cultural life is layered: shaped by memory, conflict, imagination, and change.
To be alive in culture is to understand that knowledge takes form in the present—in public dialogue, creative practice, technological experimentation, and encounters across difference. It is in this spirit that Lingnan Arts enters the University’s 60th anniversary: rooted in inheritance, alert to the present, and committed to shaping the future with imagination, judgement, and care.
