Join us from 6.30pm for welcome drinks and finger food to celebrate the opening of PRS Asia April 2024, with a welcome from PRS Asia Chair, A/Prof Jess Wilkinson. This will then be followed by our keynote addresses by Professor Shiqiao Li and Professor Tong King Lee.

The Untranslatable: Languages and Sites

When we speak of a word or text as untranslatable, what assumptions are we making about the nature of translation? Is untranslatability an inherent linguistic attribute or an emergent construct of a normative conception of translation? How might translations and translational spatial practices maintain a level of reflexivity and openness to the lifeworlds of others, so that we gain rather than lose through the process of translation?

Professor Shiqiao Li and Professor Tong King Lee will explore and discuss such questions across and beyond the disciplines of literature, architecture and languages in this keynote event, with interlocutor Dr Suzie Attiwill.

Professor Shiqiao Li is Weedon Professor in Asian Architecture, School of Architecture, University of Virginia, where he teaches history, theory, and design of architecture, and directs PhD in the Constructed Environment Program. He practiced architecture in London and Hong Kong, and taught at National University of Singapore and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is author of Understanding the Chinese City (2014), Architecture and Modernization (2009), and Power and Virtue (2006). With Esther Lorenz, he is author of Typological Drift: Emerging Cities in China (2022), and editor of Kowloon Cultural District (2014). With Scott Lash, he is editor of Theory Culture & Society Special Issue: Against Ontology: Chinese Thought and François Jullien (2023).

Professor Tong King Lee is Professor of Language and Communication in the School of English, University of Hong Kong and Honorary Professor of Culture, Communication, and Media at University College London. He is a NAATI Certified Translator (Australia) and Chartered Linguist (UK). Lee was Luce East Asia Fellow at the National Humanities Center, U.S. (2021), Lee Kong Chian Research Fellow at National Library, Singapore (2022), and IAS Fellow at Durham University , UK (2023). He is the author of Translation as Experimentalism (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Choreographies of Multilingualism (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Dr Suzie Attiwill, is a Professor of Interior Design in the School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University.