Arts-Based Research, Following the Silk Road

This course traces a fragment of the Silk Road beginning and ending in Xi’an—home of the Eighth Wonder of the World and a UNESCO World Heritage Site—exploring historical, cultural, and geographic continuities along this ancient trading network. Participants will visit major heritage sites including the Terracotta Warriors, the ancient art of the Mogao Grottoes, and modern art installations and sculpture, as well as engaging with iconic landscapes such as the Echoing Sand Dunes, Crescent Moon Spring, and the Gobi Desert. Through these encounters, students will explore themes of movement, exchange, and cultural production across time.

At multiple sites, students will interact with artists and residents, engaging in various art-making practices such as bread sculpture, mask drawing, and incense making. Throughout, students will consider tangible and intangible features of heritage and will utilize arts-based research and multimodal scholarship to produce a final project reflecting their experience.

Students will explore the complex history of the material, cultural, and artistic practices along the silk road through arts-based research. Themes will include the intersections of the contemporary and the traditional, the local and the global, the analogue and the digital, the rural and the urban, and how these themes are expressed in both tangible and intangible aspects of Chinese heritage.

Location: China | Credits: 1 or non-credit | Dates: August 2025 or January 2026  | Enrollment range: 20 - 50

Learn more and register here!