The Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation International Sinological Center in Prague invites you to
This year’s summer school explores the theme of nature in Chinese poetry, spanning both traditional genres and modern vernacular poetry from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Participants will engage with poetry that reflects nature and human–nature interactions through lectures, close readings, and discussions led by distinguished international scholars.
The summer school is open to all interested students and scholars upon submission of an online application including a short letter of motivation and a brief CV (up to 1 page). Tuition is free for all participants. Participants from Central and Eastern European institutions are eligible for a limited number of CCK-F travel and accommodation grants; to apply, specify the estimated ticket price in the online application.
The application deadline is May 31, 2025.
Michelle Yeh (奚密) (University of California, Davis, USA)
Nikky Lin (林巾力) (National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan)
Zhiyi Yang (楊治宜) (Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
Federico Picerni (University of Bologna, Italy)
Andrea Riemenschnitter (University of Zurich, Switzeland)
Šárka Masárová (Charles University, Prague)
Moderated by:
Olga Lomová (Charles University, Prague)
The format: 90 minutes of lecture followed by 90-minute reading session (with breaks in between), both supplemented with discussions. The format (the lecture/reading proportion) will be adapted individually according to each speaker. To prepare for reading and discussion during the classes the participants will be provided with the poems in advance.
NEW! Summer School 2025 Booklet
9:30–10:00 Registration (Faculty of Arts, nám. Jana Palacha 2, 1st floor, room 104)
10:00–10:30 Olga Lomová: Introduction to the summer school
10:30–12:00 Zhiyi Yang: 山水詩 – General introduction to the genre in classical poetry
(Several samples will be discussed; no special reading session on this topic.)
12:00–14:00 Lunch
14:00–15:30 Michelle Yeh: Chinese modernist poetry
15:30–16:00 Coffee break
16:00–17:30 Michelle Yeh: Chinese modernist poetry – reading session
19.00 Dinner reception (TBC)
9:30–11.00 Michelle Yeh: Modernist Poetry from Taiwan
11:00–11:30 Coffee break
11:30–13:00 Michelle Yeh: Modernist Poetry from Taiwan – reading session
13:00–14:30 Lunch
14:30–16:00 Nikky Lin: Protest Poetry in Taiwan: Nature as Symbol and Resistance
16:00–16:30 Coffee break
16:30–18:00 Nikky Lin: Protest Poetry in Taiwan: Nature as Symbol and Resistance – reading session
9:30–11:00 Zhiyi Yang: Transculturalizing the European Landscape in Modern Chinese Classicist Poetry
11:00–11:30 Coffee break
11:30–13:00 Zhiyi Yang: Transculturalizing the European Landscape in Modern Chinese Classicist Poetry – reading session
13:00–14:30 Lunch
14:30–16:00 Cultural programme (TBC)
9:30–11:00 Andrea Riemenschnitter: The Secret Lives of Matter: Alchemy and Contemporary Sinophone Eco-Poetry and Art
11:00–11:30 Coffee break
11:30–13:00 Andrea Riemenschnitter: The Secret Lives of Matter: Alchemy and Contemporary Sinophone Eco-Poetry and Art – reading session
13:00–14:30 Lunch
14:30–16:00 Šárka Masárová: Diversity of Natural and Human Landscapes: Selected Unofficial Women’s poetry from the PRC
16:00-16:30 Coffee break
16:30–18:00 Šárka Masárová: Diversity of Natural and Human Landscapes: Selected Unofficial Women’s poetry from the PRC – reading session
9:30–11:00 Federico Picerni: Bamboo forests of chimney smoke and lakes of wastewater: nature in workers‘ poetry the 1950s through contemporary 打工 poets
11:00–11:30 Coffee break
11:30–13:00 Federico Picerni: Bamboo forests of chimney smoke and lakes of wastewater: nature in workers‘ poetry the 1950s through contemporary 打工 poets – reading session
In this seminar, we will read modern Chinese classicist poems on the European landscape from the Republican to the digital era, starting with poets like Lü Bicheng, Wang Jingwei, and Guo Moruo, ending with the internet classicist Lone Carnivore’s recent poems on the Mediterranean landscape. We will interrogate the transculturalizing strategies that the poets adopt to sinicize the foreign landscape, as well as how they resist such sinicization through an alienated lens.
Topic for Wednesday
„Modern Chinese classicist poetry on the European landscape,“ with a temporal dimension from the Republican Era to date.
Taiwan literature has long been intertwined with social and political movements, often serving as a powerful medium for protest and dissent. This lecture examines the role of modern Taiwanese poetry in responding to moments of social upheaval and political repression, while also exploring how nature functions both as a symbolic language and a mode of resistance. Drawing on examples from different historical periods, including Japanese colonial rule, postwar authoritarianism, and contemporary civic movement, this talk investigates how poets in Taiwan have used natural imagery not only to evoke loss and trauma, but also to reimagine agency and resilience. By analyzing the metaphoric use of landscapes, flora, and the natural environment, the lecture reveals how protest poetry in Taiwan transforms natural elements into subtle yet powerful critiques of domination, displacement, and injustice. Through this lens, we gain insight into how poetic language has helped shape alternative ways of seeing, feeling, and resisting in Taiwan’s evolving political landscape.
This lecture draws inspiration from two transdisciplinary aesthetic projects that bridge poetry and visual art in contemporary Chinese and diasporic contexts. Ming Gathering (2015), an exploratory exhibition at the Ming Yuan Art Museum in Shanghai, showcased dialogues between twelve pairs of Chinese poets and artists, documented through artworks, poems and extensive email exchanges. The project foregrounded themes of landscape, nature, and the shared values shaping poetic and visual expression. Homeland in Transit—an ongoing curatorial initiative led by Hong Kong-born, Basel-based curator Angelika Li—brings together artists from Hong Kong and Switzerland to explore, by means of their aesthetic approaches, pertinent concepts such as precarity, impermanence, transformation, and healing. Its latest iteration, Inner Alchemy (2024), investigates how artistic practices—oftentimes involving plants and botanical materials—evoke processes of distillation, assemblage, and metamorphosis, highlighting the secret lives of organic matter. Drawing on visual and textual works from Hong Kong and the PRC, the lecture explores how alchemy-related ideas inform contemporary eco-aesthetic practices. In doing so, it challenges the presumed objectivity of modern rationalist approaches to nature and proposes alternative, imaginative, and more sustainable modes of world-making. It moreover stresses the important role of poetry and artworks in challenging the hegemony of mass communication over unhurried, in-depth contemplation and the fostering of re-/creative energy.
The lecture and reading session will focus on the portrayal of natural imagery in contemporary unofficial women’s poetry from the PRC. Tracking this imagery in the works of contemporary women poets is intriguing because they rely on their creativity rather than convention. This imagery uniquely depicts fauna and flora, presenting a metaphorical interplay between the natural and human landscapes. Traditional landscape poetry, shanshui shi (山水诗), is rarely encountered since most contemporary women poets live in urban areas and are more familiar with the urban environment. Many contemporary women poets do not hail from „Bei-Shang-Guang-Shen“ (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen) or major provincial towns. However, despite having grown up in small towns or rural areas close to nature, they have spent a long time living in cities. The variety of fauna and flora in their poetry may stem from the geographical location of their home region or current residence. They also find inspiration from their reading of Chinese and foreign literature and travelling.
The reading session will cover close reading of works by five contemporary women poets, as follows: Liang Xiaoman (梁小曼), Qi (七), Wunü Qinsi (巫女琴丝), Zhou Zan (周瓒), and Zidie Yatou (紫蝶丫头).
Workers’ poetry (工人诗歌) in China evokes several thorny questions that directly tie to crucial issues in the history of 20th-century China. These questions concern worker authors’ changing relationship to state authorities and the cultural establishment and the ability of their poetic work to provide a truthful representation, or self-representation, of the lives and conditions of the working class. Nature and the environment have always been part of worker-authored verses, either anthropocentrically extolling nature’s role in serving human activity (industrial modernisation, economic progress, weaponisation) during the Mao era, or comparing the natural landscapes of the countryside with the havoc wrought by heavy industrialisation after market reforms. In both cases, echoes of traditional culture’s and poetry’s aesthetic and emotional contemplation of nature reappear as well.
This lecture and the reading session suggest approaching this theme from a historical perspective. In particular, we will discuss Mao-era worker-peasant-soldier poetry (工农兵诗歌) and migrant workers’ poetry (打工诗歌) not as separate phenomena, but as two distinct incarnations, under hugely different historical circumstances, of the same effort to produce culture authored by workers. In connection with the summer school’s overarching theme of nature and Chinese-language poetry, we will primarily approach nature as 1) an aesthetical element present in both poetic configurations, interrogating its different (or similar) functions; and 2) a case study demonstrating the possibility to bridge Mao-era and post-Mao workers’ poetry as parts of a single historical whole, characterised by dis/continuities.
TEXTS FOR READING
NEW! Summer School 2025 Booklet
Zhiyi Yang
Michelle Yeh
Michelle Yeh poems for 2025 Summer School in Prague
Nikky Lin
Andrea Riemenschnitter
Andrea Riemenschnitter – Prague Summer_Poems_v2
Šárka Masárová
Reading Session_Masarova_Sarka_Prague Summer School of Chinese Poetry 2025
Federico Picerni
Federico Picerni_reading session materials
Venue:
Charles University, Faculty of Arts,
Prague 1 – Old Town, Náměstí Jana Palacha 2,
1st floor, room 104
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Rfx7CwbQskkAX9Vi6
Hotels:
Hotel Antik, Dlouhá 22, Prague 1 https://maps.app.goo.gl/tSPMjsg77rw9g19u6
Hotel Bookquet, Karoliny Světlé 323/27, Prague 1 https://maps.app.goo.gl/aQjDvQSTxgiRZJLb6
Student Residence AMU, Hradební 7, Prague 1 https://maps.app.goo.gl/ByHYWLcSk2jsGnsb8
Welcome dinner:
Karolinum, Charles University, Ovocný trh 3, Prague 1
https://maps.app.goo.gl/sZDrB8KDpYh7XUVT7
Places to eat:
Bistro Mezi řádky, Faculty of Arts – Náměstí Jana Palacha 2, ground floor (student cafeteria)
Kozlovna, Křižovnická 4, Prague 1 (Czech style – lunch menu)
Restaurace U Parlamentu, Valentinská 8, Prague 1 (Czech style – lunch menu)
Alforno Foccaceria Italiana, Široká 25/6, Prague 1 (Italian style)
Muc Dong, Křižovnická 8, Prague 1 (Vietnamese style)
Ramencraft bistro, Veleslavínova 3, Prague 1
Maitreia Restaurant, Týnská ulička 1064/6, Prague 1 (vegetarian)
Lehká hlava, Boršov 2, Prague 1 – Old Town (vegetarian)
Beas Vegetarian Dhaba, Týnská 19, Prague 1 (vegetarian – buffet style)
Havelská koruna (Czech buffet-style), Havelská 23, Prague 1
Palladium shopping center, Náměstí Republiky 1, Prague 1 – Food court
Quadrio shopping center, Spálená 22, Prague 1 – Food court
Wifi: eduroam – (your eduroam identity)
Wifi: ff-visitors – (your personal access code will be in your welcome package)
From the airport, the best and cheapest way to get to the city centre is the public transport – the bus stop is right outside both terminals. First, take Bus no. 59 (trolleybus) to Nádraží Veleslavín, where you change to Metro Line A and go to the city center – station Staroměstská is closest to the venue.
Hotel Antik is about 10-15-mins walk from Staroměstská station through the Old Town. Alternatively, you can switch to Metro Line B at Můstek and go one stop to Náměstí republiky, or take a tram to Dlouha station. For Hotel Bookquet, walk 10 mins from Staroměstská, or take a tram from Staroměstská to Karlovy Lázně (1 stop). Please use www.mapy.cz, or https://www.google.com/maps to find your best route.
A 90-minute ticket costs 40 CZK (1.6 EUR), a 3-day ticket is 330 CZK (13 EUR), and you can buy it at vending machines at the airport bus stop and metro stations, or using card in trams and buses (orange box). Please note that you have to validate your ticket (insert into a yellow time-stamping machine) upon entering the first means of transport. Prices and timetables are available here www.pid.cz/en.
Also, Uber taxis can be ordered from online terminals at the airport – although rather expensive (35-40 EUR), they are cheaper and more trustworthy than taxis from the stand.
The local currency in the Czech Republic is Czech crown (CZK) – 1 EUR=25 CZK. Please note that Czech shops and restaurants do not accept payment in Euros. Most places accept cards (Visa, Mastercard and most other internationally valid cards), especially in Prague, so there should be no need for cash here (except e.g. public toilets, coffee machines, or small vendors‘ stalls).
Warning: If you still need cash, please try to avoid using ATMs with the EURONET sign (most ATMs in the Old Town). The company will try to charge you hidden fees for exchanging EUR for CZK. It’s safer to use an ATM associated with a bank (Reifeisenbank, Fio Banka, ČSOB, etc.) that will always show you the exchange rate (1 EUR=cca 25 CZK).
Kateřina Gajdošová katerina.gajdosova@ff.cuni.cz +420 739 481 313
Šimon Suk simi.suk@seznam.cz +420 728 076 751
Olga Lomová olga.lomova@ff.cuni.cz +420 724 360 697
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask us or our student helpers.
For more information on previous summer schools, see
Prague Summer School of Chinese Poetry 2024: Modern Transformations
