Critical Conversations 1: In the Light of Consciousness - What is Light?
Speakers: Professor Rajeev S Patke and Joshua Yang
Wed 23 February / 7:30pm / UCC Atrium
Free admission (with pre-registration)
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Light reveals the visible world around us, but what is light itself and how does it shift the ways we interact and relate to the world?
Acting as an initiation into the phenomenology of light, and through the lens of viewing art, this panel puts into question how light intertwined with our emotional and social positions, can alter our perception and ways of thinking, and therefore, how objects and our experiences / relationships to them can evolve over time. Across the works of young children and their representations of objects, wave-light imaging in Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and the pure apotheosis of light in J. M. W. Turner’s works, the conversation offers an illuminated picture to understand how we see as who we are.
Speakers: Professor Rajeev S Patke and Joshua Yang
→ Register here
Related Performances:
Thanmai - NUS Indian Dance Blackout - NUS Stage Bodhi - The Awakening - NUS Indian Instrumental Ensemble Radiance of Hope - NUS Symphony Orchestra
Light is Subjective, Political, Contested by Dr Kokil Jaidka
Professor Rajeev S Patke is Director of the Division of Humanities at Yale-NUS College. He was educated at the University of Pune and the University of Oxford. Before joining Yale-NUS College he was Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens (Cambridge, 1985), Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford, 2006), Modernist Literature & Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh, 2013), Walter Benjamin-Extrapolations (Lambert, 2017), and Poetry & Islands (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
Joshua Yang is a painter who limits his palette to no more than three pigments at a time. He has been giving oil painting lessons to children in small groups, an endeavour that started during the lockdown. He divides his time between his home and the painting studio which is a six-kilometre walk with his dog through the ever-diminishing wilderness.
