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Final 'war' lecture Thursday

By John Andert '10
November 26, 2007

Karil Kucera, the Luce Assistant Professor of Asian Visual Culture in the St. Olaf departments of Asian Studies and Art/Art History, will present "Preserving Pain, Promoting Peace: Learning from the Memorial Sites at Hiroshima, Nanjing, and My Lai" Thursday, Nov. 29, at 11:30 a.m. in Dittmann Center, room 305. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will conclude the semester-long series of talks and events that has highlighted this semester's academic theme, "Liberal Arts in Times of War."

KuceraKaril
Kucera
Kucera completed her Ph.D. in Chinese art history at the University of Kansas. Her most recent research has focused on the memorials found at My Lai, Nanjing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her interest in these memorial sites as sacred spaces, effective uses of text and image and humankind's attempts to represent the unimaginable, are an extension of her previous works on Buddhist hell scenes.

'War is hell'
By examining memorials that Kucera has studied extensively, she will be showing how nations have utilized artifacts and images to promote peace. She also will be looking at how we as a country view war and peace and how we should get past the false ideal of right and wrong. "I'm hoping to move people away from a Hollywood view of war to a more realistic portrayal so that in the future they think twice about going to war."

HiroshimaGenbaku
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome) was the only structure left standing in the area where the atomic bomb exploded Aug. 6, 1945. It has been preserved in the same state as immediately after the bombing.
Furthermore, Kucera will comment about war as both destructive and constructive. Often times we get caught up in the death toll or the political aspect of war and overlook how war can be constructive, she explains. For example, many different art forms such as music, fine arts and performing arts flourish when a war happens or progressive discussions arise from consequences of war.

When asked about how she, as a professor of art history and Asian studies, can identify with the "Liberal Arts in Times of War" theme, she says, "I specialized in Buddhist hell scenes, and as such, the question was 'How does one represent the unimaginable?' How to visually depict to the public something they have never seen or experienced is quite an artistic challenge.

"The same holds true for these three modern sites of catastrophic loss. 'War is hell' is really a very accurate description. How do you bring the viewer to My Lai, Nanjing and Hiroshima into a different time and place and make them understand the horrors of what happened there?"

Liberal Arts in Times of War
Kucera's talk is part of a series of events that have been taking place at St. Olaf throughout the fall as part of the "Liberal Arts in Times of War" theme during the college's two-year academic focus on "Global Citizenship." The purpose of the theme is to encourage college-wide reflection on the contributions of liberal arts to understanding war, terrorism and the war against it, morality in war, and the ideas of "realism," "just war," "holy war" and "non-violence" as competing traditions in the analysis of war.

Contact David Gonnerman at 507-786-3315 or gonnermd@stolaf.edu.