A collaboration of HKU, HKUST and NUS · 2026–2029
Schools of thought, literary movements, translation projects and embodied disciplines were historical formations. They coalesced, acquired authority, fragmented, and more often than not disappeared.
Playing Heaven brings their dispersed and uneven traces into provisional relation with a domain-specific AI system, and returns every result to the passage on which it depends.
成竹於胸中
“the complete bamboo in the breast” — Su Shi on the painter Wen Tong 文同 (1019–1079)
Measured, not decorated: the marks count the function words in the phrase.
The historical problem
Early modern East Asian intellectual life did not conform to the modern disciplinary divisions by which it is now studied. It was not unusual for a scholar who revered Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) also to compose essays and poetry in the manner of Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), debate the authority of past precedents, appraise poems and paintings, and pursue medical, religious, ethical, or aesthetic disciplines of bodily, mental, and spiritual cultivation.
Philosophy, literature, religion, history, aesthetics, and embodied practice belonged to intersecting fields of learning whose boundaries shifted with scholarly affiliation, patronage, officeholding, textual circulation, and changing standards of judgment. Inherited labels are therefore treated as historical claims requiring explanation, not as stable entities defined a priori.
The complete bamboo
The title draws on Su Shi’s commemorative account of Wen Tong, whom he praised as possessing the complete bamboo in the breast. The phrase describes more than a preconceived image of the finished painting. Wen Tong had internalized the bamboo’s full life—from germination and flourishing to decay and renewal—so completely that his brush could express its dynamic existence and myriad manifestations without lapsing into mechanical imitation.
This is the challenge Playing Heaven proposes to address. The past is reconstructed from dispersed and uneven traces—a doctrinal claim in one text, a stylistic imitation in another, a political association recorded later, a translation choice preserved in a bilingual edition, an aesthetic judgment embedded in a poem, a loose affiliation retrospectively elevated into lineage. Human researchers can interpret each piece closely, but it is exceedingly difficult to hold all of them in view at once.
The method
The project uses recent advances in artificial intelligence to help assemble the intellectual historian’s equivalent of the complete bamboo provisionally—to identify recurrent structures, latent proximities, possible trajectories, lexical asymmetries, and documentary absences across bodies of evidence too large and heterogeneous for unaided comparison. The aim is not to substitute mechanical synthesis or reductive quantification for historical understanding, but to bring scattered traces into a form that permits comparison while preserving the variations and differences among them.
Case studies
Two dossiers of unequal length. The first extends earlier work on Korean Neo-Confucian lineages into literary and intellectual history; the second builds a pipeline for Manchu–Sinitic bilingual texts.
Research operations
A compound system combining transformer-based and non-transformer machine learning with rule-based methods according to the task at hand. Its components perform distinct historical operations. The historical question guides the selection of sources, the structure of the data, the choice of computational method, and the range of possible interpretations.