Visualising Chinese presence: an analysis of the contemporary arts of Zambia and Zimbabwe

With the revival and rapid growth of relations between China and African countries in the present century, the “China-Africa relationship” has become a topic of close attention globally and the media and politicians have been dominating the mainstream discourses with dichotomised narratives. China-Africa engagement has also spurred academic research, most of which is oriented toward large-scale economic, political, and strategic concerns. In this context, it is significant to conduct in-depth research exploring specific engagement between Chinese and African people on the ground. Contemporary artists based in Africa have started to represent, through artworks and performances, their experiences and expressions of relations between China and various African countries. However, an examination of twenty-first century connections between Africa and China in relation to the contemporary visual arts is a new area of study and only a limited number of scholarly works exist. To contribute to the research in this area, this thesis explores the ways in which artists engage with specific realities and lived-experiences of Chinese presence through their artistic practices, with a focus on a selection of artists from Zambia and Zimbabwe. Through visual analysis, interviews and field work, this thesis provides a systematic investigation of contemporary arts of Zambia and Zimbabwe in relation to Africa- China encounters, engaging with four aspects: the discursive field, the material presence, individual experiences of encounters, and the broader relational connections within the arts. This thesis argues that, motivated by the histories and realities of African societies, artists from Zambia and Zimbabwe, through their artistic practices, form part of the Africa-China engagement and insert their agencies in the south-south relations between Africans and Chinese. Therefore, this thesis demonstrates the value in approaching the broader discussion on Africa-China engagements from the perspective of contemporary art, arguing that, with the social concerns of the artists and the expressive capacity of creative forms, visual arts are able to embrace diversity, dynamics, complexities and contradictions, and, therefore, can develop the topic beyond the stereotypical narratives about Africa-China relations to a more nuanced understanding of African-Chinese encounters in specific contexts

A Library of Lick/IDS Indices for Binary Stellar Populations

Using EPS we present 13 refined Lick/IDS absorption-line indices for an extensive set of instantaneous-burst binary stellar populations (BSPs) at high resolution (0.3 \AA) of various age and metallicity (1-15Gyr, 0.004-0.03), and 38 indices at intermediate resolution (3 \AA). These indices are obtained by two methods: (1) obtain them by using the empirical fitting functions (FFs method); (2) measure them directly from the synthetic spectra (DC method). Together with our previous paper a database of Lick/IDS spectral absorption-line indices for BSPs at high and intermediate resolutions is provided. This set of indices includes 21 indices of Worthey et al., four Balmer indices defined by Worthey & Ottaviani and 13 indices with the new passband definitions of Trager et al. The full set of synthetic indices and the integrated pseudo-continuum are listed in the Appendix, which is only available online or from our website (http://www.ast9. com/), or on request from the first author. Moreover, the ISEDs can be obtained from our website. We compare the synthetic Lick/IDS indices obtained by FFs method and those by DC method, and find that the discrepancies are significant: Ca4455 (index 6), Fe4668 (8), Mg_b (13), Fe5709 (17), NaD (19), TiO_1 (20) and TiO_2 (21, except for Z=0.02) in the W94 system, Ca4455^T (6^T), C_2 4668^T (8^T), NaD^T (19^T), TiO_1^T (20^T) and TiO_2^T (21^T, except for Z=0.02) in the T98 system obtained by DC method are less (bluer) than the corresponding ones obtained by FFs method for all metallicities. Ca4227 (index 3), Fe5782 (18),Ca4227^T (3^T) and Fe5782^T (18^T) are greater at Z=0.03 and become to be bluer at Z=0.004, Fe5709^T (17^T) index is less at Z=0.03 and becomes to be redder at Z=0.004 than the corresponding ones obtained by FFs method.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, to be published in MNRA

Multi-Source Multi-View Clustering via Discrepancy Penalty

With the advance of technology, entities can be observed in multiple views. Multiple views containing different types of features can be used for clustering. Although multi-view clustering has been successfully applied in many applications, the previous methods usually assume the complete instance mapping between different views. In many real-world applications, information can be gathered from multiple sources, while each source can contain multiple views, which are more cohesive for learning. The views under the same source are usually fully mapped, but they can be very heterogeneous. Moreover, the mappings between different sources are usually incomplete and partially observed, which makes it more difficult to integrate all the views across different sources. In this paper, we propose MMC (Multi-source Multi-view Clustering), which is a framework based on collective spectral clustering with a discrepancy penalty across sources, to tackle these challenges. MMC has several advantages compared with other existing methods. First, MMC can deal with incomplete mapping between sources. Second, it considers the disagreements between sources while treating views in the same source as a cohesive set. Third, MMC also tries to infer the instance similarities across sources to enhance the clustering performance. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Cognitive Grounding and Its Adaptability to Chinese Noun Studies

Cognitive Grammar is a linguistic theory represented by the symbolic thesis and the usage-based thesis. Cognitive grounding theory is a newly fledged theory in CG. Studies related to grounding have been in their infancy, exhibiting a typological vigor. There have been so far no systematic studies devoted to the grounding system of the Chinese language. Chinese grammar studies applying modern Western linguistic theories have long been the pursuit of scholars from generation to generation. This paper is devoted to introduce grounding theory and then focus on its adaptability to Chinese noun studies. It is concluded that (1) grounding is a cognitive process in which the construal of entities becomes more subjective, and in which a type concept is changed into instances that are singled out by the interlocutors; (2) grounding theory and Chinese noun studies have high adaptability, so Chinese noun studies can be approached from the perspective of Chinese nominal grounding