Calendar Highlights

Smart Museum of Art
“Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China”
Saturday, Oct. 2 through Sunday, Jan. 16, 2005
10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursday; and 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday.
5550 S. Greenwood Ave. 702-0200. http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu. Free.

Presented jointly at the Smart Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, this exhibition offers the first comprehensive look at the innovative photo and video art produced since the mid-1990s in China. With 130 works by 60 Chinese artists, many of whom will be exhibiting for the first time in the United States, the exhibition reflects the enthusiastic use of media-based art by younger Chinese artists. Their ambitious and often experimental work responds to the unprecedented changes now taking place in China’s economy, society and culture. The Smart Museum will exhibit two sections–“History and Memory,” which explores the contemporary legacy of China’s past, and “Reimagining the Body,” which examines the ways the human body can serve as a metaphor for China’s culture and history. There will be an opening reception at the Smart Museum from 6 to 10 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 30, featuring exhibition tours. On opening weekend, Oct. 2 and Oct. 3, free buses running from the Smart Museum to the MCA (220 E. Chicago Ave.) will depart every hour on the hour, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Buses will return to the Smart Museum from the MCA every hour, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

The Renaissance Society
“Yang Fudong: 5 Films”
Through Sunday, Oct. 24
10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and noon-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday.
Room 418, Cobb Hall, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. 702-8670. http://www.renaissancesociety.org. Free.

Born in Beijing in 1971, filmmaker Yang Fudong has created what have been called some of the most staggeringly beautiful works of independent cinema to come out of China. This exhibition will feature an overview of his past works along with the premiere of his new film, Part II of Seven Chinese Intellectuals. The film adapts traditional Chinese stories known as “The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.” One section follows seven sages through a Shanghai apartment complex, and another follows them through a lush mountain environment. In addition, the exhibition will display Liu Lan, an unrequited love story, Backyard: Hey! Sun is Rising, about military rituals, and An Estranged Paradise, which expresses “the fear of happiness.”

Workshop on Race and Religion at the University of Chicago
Inaugural Lecture by James Cone
7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 5
Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th St. 834-9777. Free.

James Cone, the Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, will deliver the inaugural lecture of the University’s Workshop on Race and Religion. Cone’s black theology of liberation revolutionized theology with its searing indictment of white theology and society. Cone has radically reappraised Christianity from the perspective of African Americans.

Enrico Fermi Institute
60th Annual Arthur Holly Compton Lectures
11 a.m.-noon Saturdays, Oct. 2 through Dec. 4
Room 106, Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 S. Ellis Ave. 702-7823. Free.

Ambreesh Gupta, a Research Scientist in the Enrico Fermi Institute, will discuss how mass has played a pivotal role in physics since Newton discovered the laws of motion in the Compton Lecture Series. Scientists today use a description of the fundamental building blocks of nature called the standard model of particle physics to guide their research. Missing from this description is the experimental confirmation of its prediction related to the origin of mass. One of the largest experimental endeavors ever undertaken is now in progress to understand this mystery, Gupta said. Named for Compton, a University physicist and a Nobel laureate, the lectures are intended to make science accessible to a general audience and to convey the excitement of new discoveries in the physical sciences.