Yn ystod, wrth gwrs, ydych yn iawn i'r llwyddon yn mewn gwneud sydd wedi'i gweinwch i ystafell ar y cyfnod yr aelodau hynny. Roedd yma'n gweld arall y pleidydd. Yn ystod, wrth gwrs, yno ym mwyn i'r ysbydd am rydyn ni, rydyn ni'n Richard Black, ym ysbydd pro-drector ar yr ysbydd sydd ar y cyfnod yr cyfnod ar yr cyfnod ar Saes, ac yn cael ei ddweud yn y cyfnod i gweithio'r gweithio ar y cyfnod yma'n ystod yma'n rhaid o'r lechffudd ddiddordeb am barynas Balyry Amos, fe gweld yn ychydig fel ond y gallwn Lebanon am ystod o'r ymdeithas hon. Yn gyngor, fe ddim yn ystod ddynulparu gennym yma, gan yw'r ddynulparu gennym ar ddod, da'n cael.. ..a'n cael y pwnghysig ar y ddynulparu gennym ar y ddysgu llynau. Dyn ni'n cael ei panodd. Mae'n cael ei panodd ei fanodd o Chy分, o'r cyfnod yw amser, ac os yw'r cyfnod yma ar gyfer y llunio ar gyfer Y Persefydle David yw Llywodraeth Fygin yw'r argyrchu Chino?  Yn amser, mae'n gweithio dda wedi'u llwysodau ardal yn llwysodau ardal yn ei llwysodau ardal yn llwysodau'r Llywodraeth. Rwy'n dechrau, mae'r cymerthau gyda'r Ysgrifennidau, mae'r Llywodraeth Llywodraeth yn y bwrdd yw'r cyfnod i'r cyfnod hyn yn ymwyllgor yma, ac yn yw'r llwyffyr. Rwy'n meddwl, mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw yng Nghymru, ac mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw'r llwyffyr 7 miliwn a'r amser yn ymwneud i'r llwyffyr. Mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwneud, a'r llwyffyr yn y 10 ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymwyllgor, mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw'r cyfleoedd cyflwyno mewn ddiwedd y Ffondation, y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, ac mae'r Llyfrgell Ymwyllgor er mwynogi fe gydechrau'r llwyffyr yw'r gweithfyrdd yn fwy, fe fydd Fanhysg Cymru o anticipated a gwerthfawr i ddod o bryddoedd Llyfrgell neu llwyffyr amser i'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor'u cyflwyno ac mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw'r llwyffyr. Mae'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor i'r llwyffyr yn ymwyllgor yw'r llwyffyr, ac yn ddau'r fanlwys ar gyfer genesaf genedlaethau o'r gyflaenau a gliwgolau ar y gyrdd yma 2018. A'r newid yn gwybod a gwneud unig o'r gwneud. Felly, rwy'n golygu i'r gweithio cyflogol ailfaidd gael dda wedi gael Gawrden Sqaer i'r newid bwysig ar yr unig o'r Gweithgrifennu Creadio Creadio. Mae gynhyrch gwybodol ei ddweud yn ei ddweud i'w ddweudio'r newydd yw ddweud o gweithio'r pethau i'r dweud. Fy ffyrdd ei gynnwys ei iawn oherwydd Mae'n ddweud i'w ddweud i gael ysgrifennu'r ysgrifennu wnaeth ychydig, ac roeddenno'n drwllion, oherwydd i'w ddweud i'w ddweud i'w ddweudio'r ysgrifennu ddweud a gynhyrch i'w ddweudio'r drwllion. I'd like to invite you to stay on after the lecture for drinks in the Brunei Gallery, and Shane will say a bit more about that. I'd like to invite you to switch your mobile phones to silent, but please keep them in your hands and tweet throughout the lecture. And then finally, it's my pleasure to introduce two external guests of great distinction who will respectively introduce Shane and propose a vote of thanks. And I will introduce them very quickly because you don't want to listen too long to me, but we're very pleased to welcome Professor Dr Sarah Fraser, who will introduce Shane. Sarah holds the chair in East Asian Art and serves as vice-director of the Institute for East Asia Art History at Heidelberg University. Prior to going to Germany, she was professor and department chair at Northwestern University in Chicago. Sarah leads a consortium of European, Chinese and American universities in a Getty Foundation sponsored initiative focused on Chinese artists trained in London, Paris and Berlin during the 1920s and 1940s. Her books include Performing the Visual, Merit, Opulence and the Buddhist Network of Wealth, and more recently Cross Media Women and Sue Bing after Book from the Sky. I hope I pronounced that correctly. And then we'll hear Shane. And then finally at the end we will have a vote of thanks from Professor Craig Clunus. Craig is particularly apposite to welcome to give the vote of thanks as he was the previous Percival David Professor of Chinese Art at SOAS before moving to his current post at the University of Oxford. Craig has published extensively, as I'm sure you're aware, on art history and the culture of China, much of it concentrating on the Ming period. Before SOAS he worked at the University of London, so we are kind of following each other across the country. In fact, I'm following Craig rather than the other way around. He's author of Art in China in the Oxford History of Art series and among six other books he most recently published Screen of King's Art and Royal Power in Ming China. And I also realise today that he is currently the visiting Gresham Professor of Chinese Art. So over the course of this year if you wish you have two more opportunities to hear Craig speak in London. So thank you very much to Sarah and Craig for being the bread to tonight's Shane sandwich. And thank you all for coming and I will now hand over to Sarah. Thank you. Good evening and thank you very much Director Black. It is my honour and pleasure to introduce to you a colleague, collaborator and friend, Professor Shane McCausland this evening. And I would like to take you through some of the highlights of his distinguished career and provide some sense of his work and how it's situated in the larger field of Chinese art history. It is certainly a cause for celebration that there is a chair for Chinese art at the University of London and that the legacy of Sir Percival David continues into the 21st century in such a dynamic fashion here at SOAS and in the extremely capable hands of Shane. David's collection of 1700 or more than 1700 Imperial porcelain was acquired as we know almost one century ago. These magnificent objects are now housed as we've just been reprised of this history just around the corner in the British Museum and are still within easy reach for students. But many of Professor Shane McCausland's important publications also draw expertly on the Chinese paintings in the British Museum which left China just around the same time as a Percival David collection of porcelain. That is during the final years of the Qing Court or just after the dynastic period ended in 1911. And Shane has paid special attention to excavating the importance of the encounters during the first decades of the 20th century and how the history of collecting, particularly from imperial holdings has shaped our understanding of Chinese material culture and perceptions of Chinese art abroad. In these liminal moments between Empire and Republic, Puy, the former emperor, enjoyed unique access to the palace's storehouse of painting and calligraphy where his tutor entertained him with modern gifts such as cameras and telescopes and the like. And the non-sovereign monarch gifted him objects from the palace household, two of which are held in SOAS. And today during Shane's fascinating in-depth lecture we will learn more about these objects and how they circulated in a complex network of gift giving. And this is one of the strengths of Professor McCoslin's trajectory of research is to think about the circulation of objects. This is the same period of time when the Drenhuang paintings entered the British Museum's collection and of course the amonditions of the court instructorous, which many of us know in detail now through the research and conferences organized by Shane who has dedicated a great deal of his attention elucidating this remarkable scroll. His 2003 publication produced jointly by the Percival David Foundation and the British Museum joined scholars from the PRC, Taiwan, Europe, the UK and all the schools of Chinese painting studies in the US. And I'm going to say something more about that in a minute, but back to this volume just to point out it is a singular contribution to the field. This is a bible, so to speak, on the painting, or this painting, the amonditions. And something of its history, it's a palimpsest of all the connoisseurs who touched it and the relationship across more than a millennium and the relationships between those who enjoyed it and circulated it across the dynasties. After receiving his BA and MA with honors at Cambridge University, Shane pursued his doctoral studies at Princeton and by all means of reckoning, we, Shane and myself, by virtue of where we studied and with whom, we each represent the distinct scholarly divide or division in Chinese art history in the US that marked the last quarter of the 20th century. Shane, the East Coast, Yale Princeton School maintained by Wen Fang and Richard Barnhart and I, the West Coast Berkeley School at whose helm James Cahill presided. And this long-standing, simmering feud about attributions and connoisseurship probably doesn't matter anymore these days, but it did matter for a long time and even just a decade ago, it infused many of conferences and impacted the field. Actually, before participating today, I probably come to think of it, should have asked Shane where he stands on the riverbank controversy. John Da Chen or not John Da Chen and something in between Dong Yun or not. But in all seriousness thinking about the future of the field, Shane dedicates himself to a wide range of questions and problems and those of you who don't know those inside jokes about the riverbank are probably wondering what it's about and honestly it may not be much about anything. But these earlier divides in the field seem less important, especially in light of much recent scholarship. Yes, attributions and connoisseurship are critical if we're going to continue to expand the canon and include a greater range of objects that we investigate in our research. Equally important, Shane's work continues to draw our attention to how objects circulated in the modern period and earlier. This parallel history is exciting and compelling. It doesn't replace questions of style and it deepens the discussion. And there are so many other objects beyond paintings held in major museums and examples of how Shane's inquiries bring our attention outward includes his deepening study of contemporary paintings such as the Honling exhibition that he curated here in the Brunei Gallery last fall. And we look forward to more work in contemporary painting in his hands. For this reason, Shane has developed and maintained a broad network of scholars and museum professionals across the globe and he has the right public profile to draw attention to the rich holdings here at SOAS and to reach a broad public audience through the Brunei Gallery. His two-plus decades affiliated with museums and libraries means that we can look forward to an exciting mix of scholarship and curatorial projects that bring luster to this institution. His gift for collegial networking and his administrative genius has translated into a fruitful, on-going collaboration with our institute the Institute for Cwnsgysigsta Oas Aziens at Heidelberg University. We are supported under the banner of the Connecting Art Histories initiative from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles and this summer we were based here at SOAS in a project focused on early 20th century Chinese artists who trained in Europe. And this winter we will de-camp to Paris but in the next few years Shane will come to Germany and we will welcome him in Heidelberg for a series of doctoral dissertation workshops on Chinese art for graduate students. It is his gracious collegial spirit and his rigorous scholarly training evidenced by his beautiful writing and numerous awards that make him the ideal academic partner. And it is on this note that I am delighted to present to you today the Perseval David Chair of Chinese Art, Professor Shane McCausland whose lecture today is entitled The Art of Quitting Court The Last Emperor of China's Parting Gifts. Thank you. For the scenes of the scenery show last summer I mulled over the role of artworks as keepers of memory and agents of institutional vision. And tonight's lecture grew out of my puzzling about two particular mementos an album and a fan given respectively in 1926 in 1930 by the last emperor of China, Aisin Joro Henry Pu Yi, 1906 to 1967 to Reginald Johnston, 1874 to 1938, his English tutor. The fan is inscribed by Pu Yi who had been deposed aged five after the Qing dynasty fell in 1911 with two ancient poems about leaving and dedicated to tutor Johnston, which you can see in the upper right. On the flyleaf of the album the inscription in English, up or left here reads to Mr Johnston from the Manchu Emperor and this may be Johnston's rendering of Pu Yi's dedication in Chinese to the right which says the year being in fifth month, 27th day as our teacher, Zhuang Shedun, returns to his country we gift this as a memento imperily inscribed by the Xuantong Emperor. Now Johnston and Pu Yi are of course well known to modern audiences from Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 bio epic The Last Emperor but it's less widely known that in 1931 after his final return from China to the UK and his knighthood Johnston became Professor of Chinese at the then School of Oriental Studies and although Sir Reginald did not care for teaching at SOAS his collections have ended up here, some in 1935 and others after his death via his fiancée Mrs Elizabeth Sparshott and the Superstible David Foundation of Chinese Art. So the album and the fan are now formally reunited in SOAS library following the signing of the SOAS PDF library loan agreement which we celebrate tonight and in this regard I should like to thank for his generous support for tonight's event SOAS Pro Director, Professor Richard Black and also the Percival David Foundation in particular its chairman Colin Sheaf and I also wish to record my respect and admiration for the late Paul Webley, former director of SOAS who offered me the chair in 2005 and I am honoured that Professor Sarah Fraser and Craig Clunas have considered it important to come from Heidelberg and from Oxford tonight to top and tail my inaugural lecture as the Percival David Professor of the History of Art at SOAS. Now I say the fan and the album are in SOAS library but that's not quite right by kind arrangement of my colleagues in the library, the Brunai Gallery and events including Christine Wise, John Hollingworth, Gion Wood and especially Payale Gagliani-Batt and Tom White whose sterling efforts have made this evening possible they are in fact mounted together in a temporary display in the Brunai Gallery for tonight only where you'll be able to view them afterwards during the reception. I had so many questions about these parting gifts. How could they be both personally commemorative and yet majestic and royal? Matched in value to the occasion and the recipient and also embodiments of ideals and values of the court. What help with his choices did Paul Webley have from advisers skilled in art and connoisseurship? The fiction of Paul Webley's still being the Shwentong Emperor of the Manchu Qing dynasty, 1644 to 1911 as donor of both objects and the proficient quality of the album suggests that these are examples of those carefully graded compliments which we imagine well-schooled royals instinctively know how to give but just how were such things calibrated in early Republican China? For Paul Webley such artworks were his wherewithal and his currency but imperial gifting was also a long time convention in China including for gifts bestowed upon meritorious courtiers leaving court like Johnson. So what were the objects of quitting court in the 1920s? Johnson's tutelage of Pu'i had officially lasted from 1919 when the 13-year-old was still closeted with his family in the Forbidden City to 1924 when as an 18-year-old he was expelled but Johnston continued to advise him off and on during the rocky years under Japanese protection in Beijing and in Tianjin from 1925 to 1931. I did wonder in particular how did the formal choice of this early Qing dynasty album of flowers speak to Johnson and Pu'i's relationship on the occasion of the ex-tutor's return to Britain in July 1926 and I quickly realised that this was just one of several instances of quitting court between 1924 and 1931 all commemorated in some way in art. So the album presented in July 1926 was the first parting gift but Johnston unexpectedly kept returning to China the first time from 1927 to 1930 as the British Commissioner at Weihaiway and he paid several visits to Pu'i on the last occasion Pu'i hinted that his exile in Tianjin would soon come to an end and he presented Johnston with this fan which is upstairs as is shown in The Last Emperor you actually see the fan being presented. Johnston returned again the following year again unexpectedly this time for a conference but also on business to do with the boxer indemnity that's the funding that funded the University's China Committee which originally funded the Percival David chair it doesn't now but it once did. These were what would be his last meetings with Pu'i and this time Johnston secured the preface to the memoir that he had begun which would appear in 1934 entitled Twilight in the Forbidden City. This very polished calligraphy is not by Pu'i but it's by his trusted adviser Zheng Xiaoshu of whom I'll speak quite a bit more later. There's one other instance of quitting court which overshadows all of these examples and that's Pu'i's own desperate escape across Beijing in 1924 into Japanese protection. That event during a dust storm was commemorated by the Inner Circle of Courtiers in a little noticed picture scroll from perhaps 1925 reproduced in Twilight. Uncovering the art historical situation of these various works has been a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Some areas have been trickier than others but most of it needs to be pieced together before you start to get the fuller picture. What I present tonight are going to be vignettes from a longer paper focusing mainly on the paintings. Let's begin then with the album. Each of the ten leaves bears an inscribed flower painting by a scholar artist Chen Shu who was active in Nanjing in the early decades of the Qing Dynasty, that's the 1650s to 1680s. The flowers comprise peonies and pomegranate, lily and chrysanthemum mostly paired with poetic couplets composed and transcribed by the artist in an aesthetic rather than a seasonal grouping of nature popularized by the spiritual patron of this kind of ink mosellony the unconventional Ming artist Xu Wei. For comparison I show you a pomegranate by Xu Wei which exemplifies this so-called sketch conceptualist mode it shows a very similar preoccupation with iconic shading and silhouetteing and the full array of brushed textures in landing tones. Now the album has some successful if slightly repetitive arrangements you see spiky compositions speaking to the rectangular edges of the frame branches and stalks at jaunty angles are boxed in by it and meanwhile the compliant blooms are slightly tipped towards the picture plane on display. Leaf 8 depicts an arching pale pink lily stem dark inky composite strokes capture the outlines and springy forms the deep verdant hues and waxy textures of leaves and stalks and here you've got a complex tone and colour loading of the brush so that a single integrated stroke produces this idiosyncratic half blend of colours and shades note also the modulated softer prancing outlines of the main lily flower and the faded backwash for the pale pink petals in contrast with the much more intense ochre and apple green of the sepals below which are overlaid with scumbled ink. The inscription elaborates on the scene with narrative effect and synesthetic appeal this flower mostly grows by the water's edge he writes among the reeds I picked this pure display to avail of its lonely fragrance later so in lyric voice the artist reveals how he supposedly plucked the stem from a water garden for a scented pure display chingong and if this remark triggers our olfactory sense or even an anticipation of it it's because of a carefully confused looping of the sensory responses the image becomes momentarily functionally real even as its factor as a painting is underscored by the materiality of the album the ragged individualist brush mode and the lodging of poetic text in the picture's surface so a quirky formal indexicality in dialogue with the virtual presence of the forms provides a measure of the painter as a scholar artist and also of his literary urban audience so Pwys parting gift was treasured by Johnson a committed royalist but was it any more than just an old album of flowers? Let's take another leaf the inscription here reads amid the snow a rosy fragrance reveals a precious pearl so as before the artist uses synesthetic images snow white petals a pink fragrance a jewel amid the intangible to commingle senses of touch, sight and smell advanced epigraphic skill and poetic literacy are assumed here but there's nothing out of the ordinary for anyone who had a mainstream education in late dynastic China such as PwY and Johnston and anyway here in the genre of pure display and in an imperial parting gift we should hardly expect any really profound cryptic message yet such albums often did have key leaves or messages within them and two of the leaves do seem to say more as instruments about the purport of the gift one is the first leaf the peony O PwY's autobiography of 1964 is patently ghostwritten by a Communist Party hack the remarks upon Johnston's learning and character and tastes do ring true he was, wrote PwY, a connoeser of Chinese poetry I used to see him wagging his head as he chanted tongue poems just like a Chinese teacher and he was a lover of Chinese tea and peonies conventionally the peony also stood for fortune and status and for the royalist's pleasure PwY further added his imperial seal that's the big one at the top a Xuentong royal stamp and judging by the very messy impression he probably did it himself the artist's inscription refers to an intimate friendship between two people neither of us needs to say a word for us to know each other's minds this clearly was a very well chosen personal gift as to the second significant leaf although the label on the fly leaf states that the album's undated there is a date lurking here amid the highly cursive inscriptions on leaf 9 the chrysanthemum and appropriately the date here is of the chrysanthemum festival when ancestors are honoured now the full inscription reads Lu Fu's poetic emotion returns Tao Qian's wine euphoria borrowed the year Xinyo 1681 on the double yang festival now the Qing dynasty's heyday spanned the long 18th century and Fu Pu Yi who is positioned here in pink in Johnston's pedigree of Manchu emperors in twilight Chen Shu's album was painted in the very year 1681 usually marked as the start of this golden era so in green with the second founding of the Qing by the Kangxi emperor who reigned from 1662 to 1722 following the quelling of a long rebellion and in 1926 living in exile in Tianjin under Japanese protection or control depending how you look at it did this date I wonder somehow signal Fu Yi's hope for a new beginning for a post-Ching empire in the Manchurian homeland and this is indeed what Fu Yi's Japanese backers created for him with him as puppet emperor just six years later as Johnston notes under Pu Yi's name down here ruler of Manchuria from 1932 now what about the chrysanthemum festival this occasion is linked with the ancient poet and courtier Tao Qian who famously quit court in 405 to return to his country estate to cultivate chrysanthemums and drink wine but at court this was a tricky topic because Tao Qian had actually quit in disgust at court corruption and had composed an ode ever after celebrated as the classic of the demoted exiled or otherwise frustrated scholar official so in a strategy mastered by his predecessors Emperor Xuentong drained away the implied criticism from this illusion by gifting this object Pu Yi effectively gave his blessing to Johnston his permission to quit court to return to England on gardening leave what else well in art history 1681 is also just four years before the creation also in Nanjing of this disturbingly modern masterpiece 10,000 ugly ink blots by the great individualist painter Shi Tao now Shi Tao admired Cheng Shu's art as we know from his remarks on a later album of landscapes in the art canon which I'll come to in a minute Cheng Shu is generally classed as a third tier painter yet here Shi Tao praised him for achieving fame with his lofty antiquity and in the company of far better known masters Kun San and Cheng Zhengui it's typical of Shi Tao's cross grained even modern thinking to shape a diachronic concept like lofty antiquity in terms of present agency but it's also significant that in 1926 with the Chinese art world in a maelstrom of canonical transition Shi Tao was himself emerging as a doyen of an expressionistic or sketch conceptualist Xia Yi lineage the one that began with Shu Wei with also a modern following sometimes called the new progressive school Xin Jin Pae for example a young tyro like Zhang Daqian exhibited this Shi Tao inspired landscape in China's first national fine arts exhibition in 1929 such works as this were much more in tune with global modernism than works by followers of the Qing Orthodox Canon known as the antiquarian school for Gu Pae which you might have expected Pu Yi to have been a follower of so how did the Calo Pu Yi come to have in his possession an album by a painter admired by Shi Tao hero of progressive young artists when Pu Yi had been expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924 and to what degree was he even aware of these shifts in the art canon I'll come back to that In the summer of 1930 which was seen on both sides as the last parting Pu Yi presented Johnston with the folding fan A painting side shows a journey away from the capital and this was probably a commission but the inscriptions on the reverse the wonders of PowerPoint you see turn it over were however penned by Pu Yi himself and certainly you can say this on style but also if you look at the layout of the two poems you can see that the first one in green the road leads ever onward it comes as far as here under the mouse arrow and the second one out of the city's eastern gate I go on foot is in pink area here it continues the format of 5.2 format up to this line but suddenly at this point the calligrapher realises the evidently inexperienced calligrapher realises that he's going to run out of space and not have room for his dedication so he switches to these tiny characters that you see here to cram the remains of the poem in so it goes 5.2, 5.2, 5.2, 5.2, 5.0 8351 Touchingly this is quite literally a schoolboy error in transcription yet it is for that again a highly personal gift and one that opens up the question who was actually nostalgic about leaving China was it Johnston going to England or Pu Yi to Manchuria or both now how did Pu Yi come to have at hand such artworks as the album that's no secret inspired by Johnston's education in 1922 Pu Yi and his brother Pu Tia determined to escape from the Forbidden City to study at Oxford only their escape attempt in 1923 failed when Pu Yi was double-crossed by Unux Pu Yi wrote quote the first stage of our escape plan was to provide for our expenses the way we did this was to move the most valuable pictures calligraphy and antiques from the imperial collections out of the palace by pretending that I was giving them to Pu Jie and then store them in the house in Tianjin Pu Jie who came into the palace each day for lessons used to take a large bundle home after school every day for six months that's between autumn 1922 and spring 1923 now the extent of corruption among imperial household palace staff was such that the teens' takings was barely noticed was in fact unographed that had already prompted the heads of the household department to begin making an inventory of the collections and ironically their lists enabled the brothers to choose quote the very highest grade of artworks but this stocktake was also probably the cause of the infamous arson attack on the Jianfu Gong Palace a precinct in the northwest corner of the Forbidden City on the night of June 27, 1923 the fire set by eunuchs to cover their tracks in the aftermath Pu Jie tried hard to reorganise the palace but it came to nothing on the 5th of November 1924 a pawn in North China's warlord rivalries Pu Jie was expelled from the Forbidden City at gunpoint following a coup d'etat in Pu Jie's estimate in 1964 quote we must have removed over a thousand hand scrolls and more than 200 hanging scrolls and albums and these were all taken to Tianjin and later some dozens of them were sold the rest were taken up to the northeast by the Kwantung army advisor Yoshiocha after the foundation of Manchukuo and disappeared after the Japanese surrender unquote here you get that kind of almost gleeful tone of the ghost writer coming through that kind of tone of delight and disaster that writers of inventories like this always seem to adopt when they enumerate the ill-gotten gains of disgraced leaders and politicians now Pu Jie having been reunited with his smuggled treasures in Tianjin what did it mean to choose the album by Chen Shu well that prompts the question what was the state of the art canon and the critical hierarchy of his tutors and advisors and we can infer this from the personnel involved the leading connoisseurs were the imperial tutor Chen Baochun and noted antiquarian and after the gentle gong fire a royalist called Zheng Xiaoshu who had previously lived from selling his calligraphy in Beijing and who subsequently became Pu Yi's de facto court calligrapher it was he that wrote the preface for Twilight in the Forbidden City so Johnson, Chen and Zheng quickly became a triumvirate of loyal advisors to the young ex-emperor now Johnson's time as tutor to Pu Yi coincided with the first concerted moves in the new republic towards modernisation of society and culture the use of new models in the newly founded art academies sparked a ferrory in the media and in 1919 the new culture movement promoted education reforms such as replacing classical Chinese with vernacular literature and brushes with fountain pens for writing meanwhile advances in technology transformed print media spurring the growth of public opinion informed by an illustrated press and in this mix an expressive masculine ink painting thrived in Beijing and Shanghai the antiquarian scholar painter Wu Changshuo painted heartily up to his demise aged 83 in 1927 and exemplifying the social mobility of the new republic a peasant-born artist called Qi Bai Xu famed in 1920s Beijing for his ragged brush work inventive design see here the layering and the framing and his industry he was made a professor in a new art academy in the late 1920s even as he supported a child bride in the provinces a concubine in Beijing and more than a dozen children by both of them all of this coincided with the height of the Warlord era in North China between 1916 and 1928 Johnson remarks in Twilight that he was probably alone among Puy's tutors in introducing him to the news but what were Johnson's aesthetic credentials well to explore this let's consider the commemoration of events that turned Puy's childhood world upside down it's the 5th of November 1924 the city is surrounded by warlord troops and given three hours to leave Puy temporarily takes refuge in his father's mansion north of the Forbidden City for several weeks rumour and civil war plotting swirl around the city and then aided by close advisers including Johnson Puy flees concealed in a cart on the stormy 29th to the safety of the Japanese legation in the foreign controlled legation district just south of the Forbidden City and he remains here under Minister Yoshizawa's protection until early 1925 Puy's escape across Beijing during the dust storm was commemorated in this painting scroll assembled by Zheng Xiaoshu reproduced in grainy half tone in Johnson's memoir in the title piece inscribed with righteousness and dignity Chun Ba Chun called the scroll painting a storm and a marvel and appended a poem he wrote from it from which Johnston took the English title The Flight of the Dragon Johnston's translation is below there I'll come back to that in a second As to the painting the short composition is anchored at the left end by wind torn pine trees traditional symbols of stalwart scholars evidently referring to Zheng Chun and perhaps Johnston and in the middle seen through the dust storm over the outer walls of the Forbidden City the palace rooftops all askew recede into the middle distance and to the right flying half hidden in a swirling cloud of dust is the young dragon the escaping emperor going off alone now the abnormal effects include the disorienting left to right movement the vertiginous looping of the composition the dishevelled pines the childish angling of buildings out of the orderly grid matrix of the city with Zheng Xiao Xu as producer this scroll variously embodies Chinese painting tradition but in uncharted modern waters it depicts the emperor and statesman engaged in affairs of state in republican times presented through the lyric voices of scholar officials it evokes Qing court art in its collaborative production and contemporary look and despite these continuities with the past it's patently reflexive about its purpose as an emotive record of Qing derasernation from the Forbidden City after 280 years now Johnston was a China hand and close to Chun Ba Chun and Zheng Xiao Xu but not like them an art connoisseur and he either mistakenly or deliberately identified the painter as Zheng Xiao Xu whose sobriquet was Su Can if this was a mistake as I suppose it was easily done Chun Ba Chun's inscription says Su Can Tzu Hoa which means literally Su Can made this painting although in classical Chinese it can also mean Su Can had this painting made which is what he meant the signature on the painting is also confusing particularly if Johnston had only a grainy photograph like this as a record it in fact reads respectfully painted by Zheng Chang Zheng Chang Gong Hui and is penned in small formal script in a rather anachronistic formula the third and fourth characters read Gong Hui respectfully painted in the manner of artists at the Qing court it was clearly a commission from a modern artist game enough to play the part of Qing court painter and as to the artist's two character name the surname is the same as Zheng Xiao Xu's while the second character Chang is not easily legible in the reproduction in Johnson's book and it's possible Johnson never actually knew who this person was and his confusion probably arose due to the fact that Zheng Xiao Xu was also famous as a painter of pines as well as a calligrapher Johnston would have supposed rightly that Zheng could easily transpose strokes from calligraphy to paint pine trees as all scholar artists could the basic formula of his paintings backs that up you see these partial cropped views of pines which foreground ink and brushwork techniques but Zheng was not a painter of scenery like this which required mastery of a much wider range of pictorial techniques such as scale and depth, wash and texture and a more complex composition and framing and iconological effects of mood and ambience so the painting Flight of the Dragon does have various characteristics of the early works of the young artist who signed it Zheng Chang notably the anchoring clump of trees in the lower left which you could compare with this undated painting and a composition that ranges back into and across the picture frame and also the gray wash of the sky which serves equally well for the dust-strewn sky in Flight of the Dragon as it does here in the moonlit skies seen through bed branches, layered bed branches in Zheng Chang's Willow of 1926 and the signatures on these two paintings are very close as you'd expect if they were more or less co-evil and as far as I know the Flight of the Dragon has never been acknowledged as an early work by Zheng Chang Now Zheng Chang, also called Zheng Wu Chang was no ordinary painter but by the mid 1920s was emerging as a leading artist of modern literary style landscape having exhibited in the National Fine Arts exhibition in 1929 he'd attended Beijing Normal University from 1915 to 1918 which is presumably when Zheng Xiaoxu encountered him but he spent most of his life from 1922 in Shanghai working in art publishing up to his death in 1952 and he was very close to other prominent artists like Zhang Daqian his magnum opus was a compilation of Chinese painting studies a complete history of Chinese painting studies published in 1929 the title of which featured a trendy neologism painting studies Zheng Chang's book was graced with prefaces by three mavens of China's art world Wu Chang Shuo contributed this title page on the left Zheng Xiaoxu contributed a preface dated 1927 and the painter Huang Binghong another preface Zheng Chang was a sociable creature a portrait of Zheng Xiaoxu features in a handscroll painting commissioned of him in 1930 to record a tea party there's the portrait right in the middle there and he was evidently a sympathetic brush for Zheng Xiaoxu one who completed plenty of transcriptions of old master paintings with a modern flourish and who in his own words advocated quote studying painting not in order to take the past as one's teacher but so as actually to eject oneself from the old master tradition Da Da and becoming a master in one's own right by fusing reality with brush techniques of the ancients that's actually not a bad description of Flight of the Dragon but what can the figure of Zheng Chang tell us about the other paintings of concern tonight in particular the value of our Cheng Shuo album well in Zheng's history Cheng Shuo is listed in the third string of painters in the genre of flowers one of thirty who quote excelled either by dint of sheer industry or else free spiritedness who essentially could all enliven with colour and give life to fragrant flowers and were famous in their own time unquote to imagine the sheer industry mode and this is a slightly pejorative term consider two scrolls ascribed to Cheng Shuo in Taipei intended for display at the Duanwu Festival entitled elegant flowers of the fifth month like our album dated to the double ninth and it belonged in the type called pure display pictures that is elegant paintings made for festivals like New Year's Day or as here the double fifth elsewhere in Zheng Chang's text Cheng Shuo is recognised as famous in his time but the praise is qualified quote Mr Chen's bird and flower, grass and insect paintings are reminiscent of the Ming painters Xu Wei and Chen Chun that's a positive thing though one may object to his brush and ink handling as too bright be more tai guang we might say too flashy and to the lack of any distinctively untrammeled flavour unquote this is important as it elaborates upon Cheng Shuo's other free spirited mode exemplified by Johnson's album this was in the same vein as the mid Ming scholar painters Xu Wei and Chen Chun the demanding critic acknowledged that Cheng Shuo brought fragrant flowers to life but he fell short in using flashy brushwork and displaying a certain lack of exceptional flavour as hard to disagree this is quite useful engaging how the contextual value of Pu Yi's gift to Johnston was probably something above the artist's traditional third tier status we've seen how this free spirited mode was quite fashionable in the 1920s Zheng Cheng's history of Chinese painting studies which goes right up to 1929 provides more detail his exemplar is the recently deceased Wu Cheng Shuo who had inscribed his title page Wu is listed as the last of the top tier of Qing dynasty painters quote he paints flowers, bamboos and rocks in an unaffected and light hearted manner with vigour and archaism somewhere between Xu Wei and Bada Shanren indeed he profoundly captures the spirit of metal and stone that is late Qing antiquarianism among modern scholars he is the pinnacle of fashion unquote so on one side Wu Cheng Shuo is positioned as a torch bearer in art of the values of the late Qing intellectual movement referred to as the metal and stone studies or epigraphic studies movement which is an antiquarian trend within the wider intellectual skepticism called the evidentiary scholarship movement you can therefore posit antiquarian works like this one in which Wu Cheng Shuo painted in the flowers and added an inscription on a sheet of paper that had previously been prepared with an ink rubbing by an artisanal specialist in this from an ancient bronze vessel and its inscription meantime Wu Cheng Shuo was heir to an exemplar of an invigorated individualist or conceptualist CIE lineage see here in 1927 album leaf in Bada Shanren style and his painting was visualized as situated among the early modern greats somewhere between these two 16th, 17th century masters Xu Wei and Bada Shanren there is here a palatable sense of the canon of art in transition as the politically curated Qing order was being dismantled and replaced by a non-denominational set of masters with carefree sketchy brushes an expressive painting mode was being retroactively framed as core to scholar painting and the lineage proleptically founded by Xu Wei in the Ming and continued by Bada Shanren and Shi Tao in the Qing and according to Zheng Chang Wu Cheng Shuo's art supremely exemplified this visual discourse of modern scholars within the 1920s ink painting fraternity we now see the choice of the Cheng Shuo album in a new light the standard criticism held him as a third tier artist but of growing importance in the 1920s was the fact that he worked in this conceptualist ink mode and that he was a contemporary of and worked in a similar mode to the two emerging greats of this lineage Bada Shanren and Shi Tao so the album commemorates past personal and courtly relationships between emperor and tutor but it also has this new progressive quality of the 1920s which speaks as we've seen in particular to Zheng Xiao Xu's artistic network we'll never know if Cheng Baochun or Zheng Xiao Xu did pick out this album for Puy but what seemed at first like a simple memento selected from Puy's teenage art trove actually opens up the complexity of republican china's confused art world of politics in turmoil of a canon in transition and even of the validity of obsolescing royalist codes in shaping reactions to events and desires for the future so as now cares for these two gifts the fan and the album and rightly sees them as embodying its institutional connection with Sir Reginald Johnston and his service to Puy do be sure to have a look at them later in the Brunai gallery as for the flight of the dragon who knows if it survives after 1949 Chinese communists nor the ousted nationalists nor Japan under its new constitution had much reason to cherish Puy and his courtiers who made it as their reputation became enmeshed in the legacy of ambition and conflict in early 20th century East Asia Dear colleagues, friends, ladies and gentlemen it's a great honour and privilege to be allowed to say a few words of thanks to Professor Shane McCausland for what was a typically erudite stimulating an original lecture to his many achievements as a scholar of the transnational art world of Yuan Dynasty China he's now clearly opening up important new avenues of research into the transnational art world of China's 20th century and we will all have much to learn from this it's also a great pleasure to be able to celebrate the new agreement between the school and the Percival David Foundation and at the same time to welcome Shane into the Percival David chair of the history of art so I'm very conscious now that the longer I go on the less time there is to look at the art that we've just had so entertainingly introduced to us and so I need to be brief Professor McCausland and I are both graduates of the University of Cambridge where we both got our introduction to Chinese language and culture and I remain very grateful to it even if I now make my living at the other place but it has its little ways and so I offer an anecdote which and you'll need to bear with me on this does I believe have a real bearing on what we've heard tonight so 45 years ago this year on arriving at Cambridge and going for the first time to meet my director of studies a very distinguished professor translator of Persian poetry I was literally amazed to be introduced by him to Sir Stephen Runciman Runciman was the hugely renowned historian of Byzantium whose history of the crusades I had read and revered at school so meeting this great man was like being introduced to Edward Gibbon or or Summa Tien the idea that he was really in the same room as me was as I say amazing so in the kind of upper class pre-war accent I wasn't then much used to he said, ah, you are studying Chinese it may interest you to know that I once played four handed piano duets with the last emperor of China now, given that I a 17 year old grammar school boy from Aberdeen had a somewhat more restricted social circle no witty repost came to my lips but I have enjoyed telling this story many times in my life given that it puts me at only one degree of separation from Puyi himself that close to the dragon throne however a recent and exhaustive biography of Stephen Runciman reveals not only that he seems to have made this claim and told this story to everybody he met but that it isn't true he did indeed come to know Reginald Johnson in the course of a grand tour which took him to China in 1925 but meticulous research by his biographer reveals that he never in fact met Puyi at all never mind tinkling the ivories together it was a myth or less kindly a lie so now I'd like to invoke a figure from Shane's other great alma mater Princeton University where Harry G. Frankfurt taught philosophy with immense distinction from 1990 to 2002 in 2005 he published a short and uncannily prescient book on bullshit a serious work despite its title where he defines his topic as quote, speech intended to persuade without regard for truth the liar cares about the truth and tries to hide it but the bullshitter is both more dangerous and more morally wrong than the liar in that they don't really care whether what they say is true or false as long as it has the desired rhetorical effect I'd now put Stephen Runceman in that category at least as regards his encounter with the last emperor of China the mystique of the fallen empire often involving alluring tales about the imperial collections these I suggest have been immensely productive of bullshit in the study of Chinese art a field which in general has perhaps seen enough of that commodity so to hear the lecture we have just heard blending care and imagination into the best kind of scholarly bullshit director is a great intellectual treat and an index of work at the highest international quality in fact, let's face it there has been and sadly still is a lot of bullshit talked about China in the wider world misinformation which isn't quite lies but which cares too little for cannons of evidence or proof and is content to tell stories rather than ask questions that's why the kind of rigorous scholarship we've been privileged to witness tonight firmly grounded in both linguistic and disciplinary skills of the highest order is so important this school has a great record to uphold and after tonight we can be in no doubt that as Percival David Professor of the History of Art Shane McCausland will uphold it with great distinction and in full measure so I ask you to join me again in congratulating and thanking him once more


Oh, there's an idea. I like it. All right, we're five past. Let me do a quick roll call here. So I have Alexis, Joe, Liz, Matt, Jiang. Is Brendan, Brian, Jeff, or Michelle here? Did I miss? Oh, it was Brian Grant. Okay, I see Brian. Cool. Jeff or Michelle? I don't see you right now. Okay, but we have six. We have quorum, so we're good. Let's go kick it off to Liz for the agenda. Okay. Hi, everyone. We will move very swiftly on to welcoming Amy, who I hope is on the call. Amy, are you here? Sure am. Hello. Awesome. So welcoming, Amy, who is going to be the driving force behind projects to help us in the CNCF. Do you want to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your focus? Sure. Yeah, I'm Amy Scavarda. You can find me at Amy on Twitter. You can find me at Amy at Linux Foundation. My focus right now is going to be kind of building more of the SIGs, building out our project services. And you might have known me from my previous role at Red Hat, where I was the Gluster Community Lead. So, come on. Good to see you all. Big welcome to Amy. Yay. Welcome, Amy. How do we do applause on this thing? Yeah. Yeah, slash applause. I would just say it. I just said it into the chat. Awesome. All right. You've gone. Yeah, Chris, do you want to talk about this? Yeah, sure. I'll do the shameless shake down. So, China is coming up in a few weeks. It's a little bit hard to believe that we're doing another QCon so quickly, but hope to see many of you there. It's a great program. Final kind of call for CFP and sponsorships for North America are open and will close in about a month from now on, I think, July 12th, end of day. So, if you're interested in speaking or sponsoring, please feel free to contact us. And then for Europe next year, we'll be in Amsterdam on March 30th through April 2nd. So, kind of exciting to be in a new city in Europe. The final kind of thing is, I know many of you were at QCon recently in Barcelona. And, you know, generally, we've been talking to a lot of our kind of members and attendees, trying to get feedback on how to consistently and constantly improve the program. So, I kind of like to open up, you know, the TOC call, not only TOC members, but also community members on this call to kind of give any feedback on what went well, what would you like to see improved, and so on. So, we are going to be producing a transparency report in, I think, we're going to try to get it out by the end of this month that will basically, you know, fully showcase, you know, what people's, you know, feedback were on different talks, the overall program, yada yada from surveys that we do after the event. But I'd like to open up now to just get any feedback from the kind of wider group here in the TOC on how things went. Well, I'll start, because you know me, I never hesitate on this stuff. Sure. So, I got three things. So, number one, I think it felt a lot less vendery this time around, which I thought was really good. There were, especially the keynotes, I think, were very much focused on users and use cases. I think calling out sponsored keynotes helped make them be a little bit less sponsored for, you know, if that makes sense. So, I really like that change in that, you know, it was, you know, the venue was problematic. You know, I say this because, like, VMware holds VMworld year up there every year, and a lot of people at VMware love the venue, but I think, you know, there was a lot of walking, the food was crap, and some of those big sort of warehouse size, hanger size rooms with the partitions didn't do a great job of sound isolation. Okay. And then the second thing, and I don't know the right answer to this, is that my busiest day at KubeCon is the Monday before KubeCon, because we end up with all these, like, co-located events. And so, I feel like that's where I'm actually getting dragged into, like, 12 different directions. And so, I don't know if there's an answer to that, because I think just naturally everybody wants to co-locate stuff with KubeCon. But, like, that Monday feels like it's gotten overloaded to the point of being really hard for at least me to manage. Okay. Do you, on the sponsored keynote thing, do you think explicitly calling them out as sponsored keynotes forced the keynotes to be better? Because I did notice that this year they were way better than they have been in previous times. That's just because I spoke as I spoke. No, actually, for what it's worth, I think that they, I think that they, you know, for whatever reason, they came across as less sort of, like, come by my shed and more, like, you know, let's talk about how we were, like, community, which I think is a good change. Yeah. And I'm just wondering if that was related to them being explicitly called out that way, where people may have decided to change things up. But yeah, I didn't notice. I would guess so. I think most of the credit actually goes to Brian Lyles and Janet Cua who did pre-calls with all the regular keynote speakers and the sponsored keynote speakers and talked about what the community was expecting. We try that all the time, but yeah, maybe Brian and Janet cracked the code this time. Well, I think also it might be good to collect the ones that were particularly good. And not only from, like, from maybe the survey content has that, but there might be something more qualitative. Like, I particularly liked, I have personally found the landscape a little problematic in its categories, not particularly being helpful to me. However, the one, I can't remember who it was that used it to show what things that they were using in their deployment. And I found that to be really helpful. Like, somebody's actually saying, we're using these particular things in these buckets. And that, I don't know, I found that format to be appealing, informative, also revealing of things that companies often don't tell you. And so that kind of opening up and sharing things that are not about their, what they're selling or providing. I found particularly just like, it felt genuine and it felt educational. And it was also a great call back to the landscape. So I think picking out some formats that are appealing and suggesting that they pick one of those formats or propose a format might help because then the format leads them towards presenting something that's educational in a value as opposed to a pitch. Yeah. Anything, I see Suga said about track hosts. How do people, people generally pretty positive about that? I thought that was great, actually. I mean, good. I mean, we had a track host in our team for two tracks. And he was a little bit, he felt very much kind of in the background, which may have been a good thing. So he was kind of unsure what the track host was supposed to do. So I think in the future, clear a guidance on what your expectations are for track hosts would be good. Okay. Duly noted, Alexis. So, I mean, one thing that I think on the track host thing, I think it might be worthwhile to explore doubling down on that idea. I know like QCon, which is different from QCon, because this isn't confusing at all, like actually has the track host help curate the talks and actually sort of bring speakers in. And it creates a much more curated feel for the talks. Because I think we do have the problem where there's just way too many submissions across way too many topics. There's duplication. I think that's just a matter of scale. So maybe sharding out some of the sort of picking the talks responsibilities, you know, might be something to explore. And I think also just from a SIG perspective, it was an incredible opportunity to of gathering people together. I think that if there were some kind of a, I didn't think about this in advance, but some kind of like after the intros and deep dives, a space for people to overflow to it could help with that community building. And then also we kind of retroactively are pulling together all of the security based talks. And I wonder whether we could do that, you know, in advance in the future, whether whether it be a formal track or not, I think pulling together a thread of these are all talks along a theme could really help people with maybe some spaces that are allocated towards discussions around a theme so people couldn't gather. I think that would be really helpful because it was kind of hard to connect to people. You always had to create meeting spots and miss something, you know, like, I think some kind of less formal gathering spaces would be really helpful. On the topic of talks themselves, one of the things that really jumped out me during the serverless practitioner summit was that, you know, people get up there and they talk about what they submitted for CFP. So it's basically what people want to talk about because sort of gets pushed on the community. And it'd be really nice if there was some way if we could sort of allow that to be sort of turned around and allow the community to tell us what do they want to hear relative to talks, right, just because, you know, we may have a whole bunch of talks out there for any of the particular tracks that they're they interested into themselves, but there may be a gap in terms of what the community actually wants to hear about. And I don't know what the mechanism would be, but it'd be really great if we could come up with some way for the community to say, for the next coupon, I would like to hear talks on this topic of that topic of that topic. And then I'll encourage people to do CFPs on those particular topics, hopefully. I second that. I think that's a great idea. Yeah, Lewis, I didn't I didn't hear you well. So if you're mic, yeah, we hear you now. Okay, yeah, I was just thinking that I second that I participated a lot in OpenStack. I know there's a plus or minus to that model also. But I feel that the community changes every six months. And I from my point of view, I see that the community, again, I've been participating in KubeCon since one point, sorry, within is one point three. And I've noticed now specifically in KubeCon Barcelona that persistence is changed is something that people are looking into. And I feel that maybe it's something that we can talk about, or allow them, you know, get more feedback from the users to see what they would like to see in talks. Okay, I think some of the feedback. Yeah, I know, I heard a lot of clear. I think we could expand a little bit of our post conference survey to maybe include more of, you know, what what you didn't hear, or what would you like to hear? So we get some more of that concrete data from books. I think it's a good first step. Yeah. And to echo what Sarah was saying, the very last day in the Kubernetes storage SIG, the last question was, well, what, what is the difference between the SIGs in, you know, CNCF and this SIG? And that was a bummer that that was the very last day of the conference, the very last question, you know, where people could have gotten involved at the beginning. So I don't know, maybe we could have like a want to be involved booth, you know, that the maybe co-chairs can recruit people and have them better understand it, because it still seems like there's a lot of fog around what, you know, what value there is, what happens in those, how do people get involved? I'm not sure how to communicate that better. Okay. Thanks. I think one of the things Amy, you know, and I will be working on is as the CNCF SIGs get booted up, we'll try to be a little bit more clear on kind of the marketing and delineation between, you know, what they do versus the Kubernetes SIGs and just overall, you know, the role in the wider ecosystem. But that's something for us to kind of work on in the coming months. That's reminding me that I had good things about the project booths, I think they were well received. Yeah, no, the Prometheus, I talked to the Prometheus maintainers, they loved it. And just like nonstop traffic, which sometimes is challenging as a maintainer, juggling everything, but they were able to do it. So I think we're going to expand our project maintainer booths for KubeCon San Diego is the plan, because the feedback's been so positive. Yeah, same with the work. I talked to them quite a bit, and they were very pleased to be able to talk to so many people and have that opportunity. And it really brought in, you know, a diverse people, you know, set of committers, different companies to represent that. So that was neat to see. One factor for the CNCF SIGs is that they'll get their own maintainer track talks in San Diego, just like the projects do. Yeah, can we make sure we do that earlier in the schedule rather than later? Because maybe that would spark some people's desire to be part of that and communicate with those people throughout the week, rather than the very last day of the conference. Can you elaborate on what the maintainer track is? That, you know, like, we can be offline, I'm just not really familiar with that or point me to some of it. No, there's a long blog post on it, but in summary, we had the call for papers track, which is about two thirds of the talks at the event. And that goes through a program committee of about 100 people as organized by the co-chairs. And then separately, every CNCF project and Kubernetes SIG and now CNCF SIG also gets an intro and deep dive talk. And those are listed as the maintainer track talks. And so there's about five or six of them going on in parallel two to three days. Great. We actually participated in it. Just didn't quite realize the track format. Thank you. No worries. Sure.  If that was spread over two days, would that be beneficial for folks? Or it's just like two days of just a lot to attend to because it's, it's, there's a lot of going on in day zero. But, you know, I don't know if we want to extend KubeCon to be the full week, essentially. So, no. It's too much. When I was there for Cephalocon starting on Sunday and by Thursday, I would just, yeah. So I mean, so one thing I would say Chris is, is, you know, there's co-located events that are sponsored by companies very vendor centric. Correct. Those take attention in time. I know they're a revenue source, but they also take time and attention away from things that are more community focused. And so if we're looking to slim down the number of things going on at KubeCon so that it actually is more focused on the projects, moving away from the vendor days, you know, on that Monday might be, might be a good way to go. Yeah. One, one other thing that might be worth considering is, is maybe just breaking up some of those co-located events so that they're either shorter or they're sort of split into sections so that people could attend multiple co-located events because one consistent bit of feedback I got was that, you know, people wanted to attend maybe more than one co-located event, but that's what prevents it from doing so. Yeah. So it's a, it's a, it's a tough scheduling problem with multiple constituents that all have different views on, on this. So yeah, if you have ideas on, you know, how to improve things versus, you know, maybe forcing things to be half days or across multiple days, front end, tail end, just please send it our way. It's just, it's a tough problem. Just a thing I'd like to add is, is there a, can you hear me okay? Yeah, I hear you. You're a little bit light, but I could hear you. Okay. Is there, one of the things that I, I feel that it could be dangerous, not dangerous, but we have to be careful of is the amount of time we allocate to CNCF projects themselves. It may be at the sandbox level at the, at the next levels up. I just want to be careful with, with those types of talks that they, and how they compare to, as a normal CFP, and how they compete with each other. I'm concerned that there may be more introduction to projects becoming sandboxes just to get talks in, because otherwise they wouldn't get a talking, right? We have to be careful how we manage that, because if not, we're gonna get that view, in my opinion. Okay. Yeah, the previous TLC actually made an explicit decision not to promote any sandbox projects at all. And I think we should stick to that or at least officially change it. And I don't think that is actually happening in practice. We, for example, had a sandbox project presented on a, at a keynote presentation. So I think that this TLC should make a clear decision whether they can stick with the plan to not actively promote sandbox projects. And if so, we just, we just have an actual sandbox and put them in there and then everyone else can have a normal booth. Yeah, I think it's, I think giving that clear feedback to the program committee could be, could be good, because it is challenging sometimes if you had a sponsored keynote or something, they could kind of choose what they do. I don't know what the specific context was in this case, but I think that's clear feedback that TLC could give to open SDS and it was in Brian's keynote. So there was obviously some miscommunication around that. Okay. Yeah, we'll circle with the program committee. I mentioned that to Brian. Okay. Oh, already. So, so he's, he's aware of that, that you won't see the project overviews mention the sandbox going forward. And small thing on the schedule, I think maybe delineating like sandbox projects explicitly calling them out as such could be useful on the schedule now that I think about it, but okay. Any other Just to be clear, I think they should not be on the schedule. I mean, they should not be, they should not receive maintain a track. Interesting. Because that constitutes the promotion that we've decided not to do. I guess it depends how you define marketing versus event space. Yeah, I think, I think that TLC would have to be clear on, on that specific thing, giving them like an event, event space to have their own little session and do an intro and deep dive. I don't think it would necessarily constitute over marketing, but that, that's my, that's my opinion. I think we have this constant challenge and this constant compromise between, you know, the levels of two diligence for sandbox projects versus the amount of airtime they get from the CNCF and the events. The challenge is if we, if we give them a lot of airtime, that's the factor promoting them and, you know, perhaps putting them at the stage where they're not yet ready on the, you know, and that should perhaps reply then more due diligence. But if we want to keep the bar low, which I think is a good idea, then we should probably minimize some of those things. Yeah, I agree. Like I've always said, like on the keynote stage or stuff like that, there should be no sandbox projects, but giving them like an intro or deep dive always seemed reasonable. But I think maybe the TLC needs to have a discussion on, on kind of their stance on this and maybe come back with a statement to the, to the program committee. Yeah, I am wondering whether Sandbox should at least only have one rather than two slots. That could be a compromise also. Yeah. So, so maybe we could kind of create an action item for the TLC to kind of discuss this over the next, you know, a bit to come up with some formal feedback to the program committee and what kind of work from there. Sounds good. All right, we're about almost halfway through. I think we should try to go to, yeah, if you have any other feedback on KubeCon, you could always send an email to events at CNCF.io paying Dan or I. We're always happy to kind of hear from you. So, all right, SIGs, go headless. All right, so we have two SIGs now. I believe they're both solid, right? Chris, are we looking for a formal vote here for these TLC approval? Yeah, so storage has added some essentially co-chairs and tech leads and based on the governance process, we need essentially a formal vote, but we have quorum on the TLC today. So, if there's no opposition for Erin Boyd to take an additional co-chair roll and Bradley Childs for the tech lead role for SIG storage, then, you know, we could kind of consider that approved and not do like a formal email vote. So, if there's no one opposed to this on the TLC right now, I'll consider it approved and go. Any other statements or SIG storage, maybe Alex or someone from SIG storage wants to make the case why they're doing this? So, we're doing this for two reasons. One, we had a vacant co-chair slot and Erin has sort of put her hat in the ring. And I think, you know, she would be extremely well qualified to do this role. Plus, she's also, you know, very well known in the community. Similarly, Brad would be extremely valuable in a tech lead role and currently co-chairs the Kubernetes storage SIG as well. So, it just brings a lot of experience to the team and helps with the projects that we're looking at. So, is there, you know, in the SIG charters or in the when we define the SIGs, is there a set number of chairs and tech leads? Because I know with the Kubernetes SIGs, we kind of leave it up to the SIGs to figure out how they want to structure themselves. I'm just curious, I mean. My recollection is it's defined for three co-chairs but I'm not sure there's a definition on tech leads. Yeah, I recall that being similar, but I have to look at it. Yeah, the SIG charter says three co-chairs but doesn't specify a limit on or doesn't specify any number of tech leads. Okay. Is that the SIG charter for this SIG or is that for all SIGs? I'm just, okay, I don't remember seeing that. Okay, cool. And this is Luis. I'm just a little bit concerned about two people in the SIG company and the same, you know. So, if you need another tech lead, I throw my head in there. So, let me know. We can discuss that after, Alex. I knew you were going to spot Luis. I was waiting. So, any of the other current co-chairs, I don't believe either of the current co-chairs are red hats. I don't believe any of the current tech leads are. Okay, so it'll be two out of seven. So, yeah, I also think, and I think Amy can step into this role, but it would be great to actually look up at whether we're following the rules. So, we went through a bunch of thrash or iterations in getting our material together. And then I realized yesterday that Dan hadn't pull requested himself into a TOC contributor. So, I think, like, let's, you know, like, I think having everybody double check. It's on the agenda. Don't worry. Amy and I will be on it soon. Awesome. Yeah, I would suggest we give this another two weeks or so just to let everyone weigh in because I'm not sure that everyone's given it full consideration. Okay. Well, in terms of the tech leads. Yes. Okay. I'm fine deferring it to next time and letting SIG storage come back. So, that works for me too. Okay. Go. All right. We had a great suggestion, what came to me through Alexis. I know some other people were involved. Sarah was one of those people around encouraging diversity by using the SIGs as a nurturing ground to get more underrepresented groups into roles within those SIGs. I think that was an awesome idea. Unless anybody has any kind of objections to that, I want to just try and get that incorporated into the SIG. I can't remember what we call it, the process or charter whatever it is. So, if anybody has any comments on that, I think it was a really good email discussion about it. Otherwise, I think we should incorporate that. And then the last question on this slide is, what SIG would like to be formed next? And I saw in the agenda document, I think, Ken, I don't know if Ken is on the call, but he was suggesting ah, I've forgotten what the name of it was, traffic. Yeah, that's right, Liz. We've been a little bit slow. I think when just as soon as the SIGs where the documentation was formed for what those are, we were excited to you go over and reincarnate the networking working group into well, either between SIG traffic or SIG network, or maybe the both of them. But anyway, it was to expand the scope. The networking goes deep and wide. There's a backlog of things to review. Things like SMI were just announced. It's a happen in space. Ken and I have been co-chairing the networking working group for some time. We spoke with Matt earlier on and gotten a draft proposal that's yet to be PR, an issue yet to be created. So, yeah, I think we're raising our hand there in terms of up next. Fantastic. I think maybe in the interest of time offline, I would like to request that co-chairs from SIG Storage and SIG Security, having been through the process of forming your SIGs, if you have feedback on the process and if there's anything we need to tie up, let's do that sooner rather than later. So, let us know. All right. And I think there's no reason why we have to only form one SIG at a time. So, if anybody else is out there thinking, I also have a SIG that I want to form. You are also welcome to start drafting your proposal. I think that Michelle and I will be trying to put something together on apps and app delivery. So, I want to mention this because there are a few other folks who are involved in drafting some ideas around that back in November and December. So, if you want to be involved in this, get in touch with me or Michelle or both of us by email, please. Yeah, I was going to suggest that we get the core and applied architectures together as well. And I can assist with that if needed. Seems like one of the more necessary of the CNC of SIGs and we can start putting all together sooner rather than later. Can you do a formal call on the TOC list, both Alexis and Quinton, just to raise awareness? Not everyone attends this call. Sure, we'll do. All right. I'm just opening the issue, T213. This is the archiving process, right? Sorry, it should be... No, it isn't. Oh, it's the... It's Brandon, CVE process, right? Did I link the wrong issue? Sorry, one second. No, no, no. It was my memory. Do we have Brandon on the call? I don't want to go check one sec. If there's a critical Brandon exception. Yeah, no. If he's on the phone, what is it? Star, Star... I forgot how to unmute on Zoom, but... Brandon, do you read me? If not, I'm happy to summarize kind of the issue. Yeah, Star 6 to unmute in case you're there, Brandon. All right, let's assume he is not, but the issue at hand was basically as our projects get kind of more mature, you have to develop some process to do security disclosures, CVEs, and so on. And so some of our projects have gone through this, and it is a bit of a somewhat of manual process to get an actual CVE ID and file something and publicly disclose it. So we started a kind of discussion of whether it makes sense for CNCF to kind of be a CNA, which kind of could produce these IDs or use other tools out there. You know, I think the discussion's been a little bit mixed. Also, just I think last week, GitHub announced a bunch of kind of features in this space that kind of help us out quite a bit. I don't know if people have any strong feelings on kind of where we should go with this, but you know, I've had personally a lot of conversations with GitHub and being giving them a lot of feedback on kind of how they can improve security disclosures, and they've been taking a lot of that to heart and are going to have features in the future like producing CVE IDs. So it'd be a decision where we just kind of continue to wait for GitHub and work with them to make sure the tools work for us, or we could do something else. So I don't know how people strongly feel about this, but I think it's gotten a lot better with their new tooling announcements, at least in my opinion. I've got to agree that the things that GitHub have been doing in this space are great. I don't think what they've done so far actually gives the CNA problem a solution yet. Not yet. I know there was a question raised about what the other Linux foundations are doing. Yeah, a lot of them either there's two approaches.  Some will use Hacker One to do the disclosure process and create the CVE ID from that. So those are kind of, or some will just do the MITRE form, essentially, or the equivalent of that to create the ID. Yeah, I think one thing I was hoping Brandon might be able to share with us, or maybe anybody else on the call might know, if there are any examples where using relying on the MITRE process has been insufficient or caused problems for us. I mean, yeah, the most recent case, I don't know if Matt is on the call, but when on-point through it, I think generating the ID didn't take super long, but all the other shit that you have to do with downstream dependencies, all that stuff was painful. But that's not really the ID generation, but it's just notified. Yeah, I mean, our experience was that it was not very much work to get the ID. I mean, there was some latency, like you have to fill out the web form, and then it takes a day to get the ID back. And then there's some latency again, when you go to finalize the CVE, it takes another day or two for them to update the text. But per what Chris said, I mean, in our experience, that time is dwarfed by all of the other stuff. So at least from our perspective, we don't have a problem with what we did. And okay, I mean, we could make a call to other projects, but I think GitHub is very interested in solving this problem from my conversations with them, at least on the ID generation part in the future. The other parts are just notifying all your downstream folks. That's just a hard problem in general. I don't know how to do that automatically. Yeah, I think I am fine with that kind of status quo, leading towards being able to use these GitHub solutions, unless and until we come up with some reason why it really isn't good enough, I'm happy with it. Anyone else? Okay, I think maybe we should sort of document this and kind of close that issue two on three then. Yeah, I saw a comment from DIMMS. Yeah, if there's specific things on why it doesn't work well for Kubernetes, please let us know DIMMS and we'll try to address it. So I didn't know, I thought for Kubernetes, the CVEs were generated through either someone at Google or Red Hat who had basically access to do that as a CNA. So I don't know if the ID generation was a problem or something else. So please comment on that issue before we close it out, okay? That's fair enough. Cool. What's next? Oh yeah, cool. What's it take this one? I'm happy to take this one actually. Yeah, so I think it's been pretty public over the last few days that Rocket is being kind of archived by Red Hat and personally I would like us to well take a vote on archiving, exercising our new archiving process and moving Rocket into the CNCF archives as well. I have reached out to most of the maintainers and I would say the general feeling is that that is from what they've said to me. I think that's the right move. I think they agree that is the right move. And yeah, so let's open that up for discussion. Any thoughts, concerns, questions? They did actually raise some interesting points about the kind of wording on the archiving process where we say things like we're not going to take service desk requests but we're also going to support transitional documentation. So we need to kind of clarify that but I think the spirit is understood even if the wording is not. The only thing about the process that I thought was a bit weird is it doesn't include a presentation to the CNCF. Even if that's effectively an exit interview, I think there ought to be a presentation from the maintainers about what went right, what went wrong, any kind of potential future and a place for people to ask questions because at the moment there's a at least two weeks email come issue discussion but no formal presentation. Do you think that could be an optional presentation? I mean I can obviously imagine a scenario where the maintainers do not want to do that. Yeah, that's a cool idea but I think doing it as an option would be nice. I think in this case it's relatively straightforward but there could be cases where it's a more complicated process and certainly there are possible discussions about other people who might want to take over the project and you can imagine in other situations it might be even more complex. I was going to raise a similar question and I don't know if this got resolved but there was some question as to where the IP goes when things get archived. I think Joe raised the question and then the counter question is what happens if it wants to come out of archive. Has that all been resolved and if so what is the final decision there? The default it lives with the Linux Foundation just like anything in CNCF per se. If there is a desire to move somewhere else maybe like another non-profit we're happy to support it as long as the project wants to do it. It could never go to like a for-profit entity but like hey I don't know maybe I want to you know go to the patchy or something we could try to happily arrange that it takes definitely some work on our end but as long as a project wants to do that we're happy to support it. Just to be clear are we moving it are we moving the ownership from the CNCF to the Linux Foundation or are we not moving the initial? It's all part of the Linux Foundation anyway CNCF is directly under the LF. I understand but does the IP stay in exactly the same place when we archive the project or does it move? In this case it stays exactly where it is. Okay makes sense I thought it was moving. I mean just one thing as we roll this out you know as this is the first project that's being archived there's going to be a lot of questions there's going to be like probably some press around it you know there may be some confusion I think we just got to be ready to sort of like you know make sure that we can clear up any confusion direct people to the right folks be sort of authoritative about any answers that type of thing. Yeah I think we don't rush this let's let's be diligent do it do it slow come up you know basically everyone on the same page but I totally agree with you Joe let's let's not rush this get everything documented get a fact created and and do our best and set the example for for projects moving forward. I think that sounds great and I think the timeline in the process it says at least two weeks so there's no there's no reason to rush. Did you think they're open for a presentation by the way Liz I know the Rocket folks fairly well I don't it's a little bit ask them right like you know yeah let's let's ask them let's ask them if they would like to volunteer you know. All right any other comments from anyone around Rocket okay okay is Michelle here yeah I don't see her yeah that's a shame uh looks like she'd made some really great points here we want to try and clarify what graduation criteria for spec projects in particular um I think this has been the question has originally been raised around graduation criteria because of projects like TAF but I can understand for other projects that want to move out of the sandbox I think some of the the measures will be the same so things like what do we mean by an end user um yeah so this is this is Doug from the cloud events perspective we're very interested in this there are actually two different questions that popped up because we're considering going from sandbox to incubator and the first question which is the easier one is is there a requirement that the spec have to be at a certain level right can it be alpha or beta or does have to be 1.0 my assumption has been that there is no version number requirement on us but I wanted clarification from the TSE on that first and then the second question is that what you talking about Liz is what does end user mean for a spec perspective right is it just three products are using the spec or that they're end users of those products using the spec yeah I think to that first point Michelle made a very good uh statement there about wanting to see that the spec is stable and unambiguous uh I feel that taking that to the point where you say and therefore must be at version 1.0 might encourage people to uh use a number that may or may not be appropriate to the actual state of the spec right you don't want to force them to go one point or prematurely right right I think incubation products products are not required to be at 1.0 either so it seems asymmetric yeah but I what's interesting is I don't think the document says anything about version numbers at any at any level even graduation which I think is kind of interesting I suppose it would be reasonable to expect that at graduation it was at at least 1.0 but I mean that's kind of for some definition of 1.0 isn't it okay version numbers mean nothing in this industry so yeah okay so I take away from that it's then there is no requirement of version number which is what I assumed that that's okay I think the bigger question is end user well actually I think there is also the points about stable and unambiguous spec how do we judge I mean both at graduation level and that's incubation level like how stable and well I guess we'd all hope that any spec is unambiguous um I guess one thing we could do is we could ask the sigs to you know or you know the appropriate sig to review it and decide that it is or isn't unambiguous and we could also be looking at I don't know time since last change um well I would also I'd ask how could you possibly consider it to be stable and unambiguous if there's no applications that have used it right if it's just vendors who have mutually agreed that their implementation is good but they themselves don't have users that are interoperable I don't see how one could say it is unambiguous like you just sorry yeah yeah I wasn't meaning to say that would be the only criteria I was just looking at the bullets in front of me and working through them one at a time I completely agree with you so I mean at the end of the day you know sandbox incubation is about the fact that you know something has wide participation beyond single vendor it's in production being used by users and I think that same like that in general that's what we're looking for I think that applies to specs also um one thing we might want to explore is our requirements for some sort of test suite against the spec right because that's that's one way to start you know uh it's a level of maturity that you know we expect in terms of projects as they move towards graduation in terms of testing and it also is is helpful with respect to interoperability between implementations I was under the impression that we only housed specs with reference implementations is that true or are we considering being home to specs that do not have come along with a reference implementation which would be presumably that some sort of test suite I don't think that's mentioned in the criteria as of right now but I think even if we have something that has a reference implementation with it I mean like a versus fire I think it's still worthwhile to have a test suite associated with the spec that's different from the test suite against the against the implementation fair enough fair enough I'm just not sure that it's possible to write a test suite against the spec that doesn't have a reference implementation but yeah I would I would encourage us to mandate a reference implementation with the specs but I don't know what that how that sits with the TSE well I think what we can say is that for any spec you know before it moves past sandbox we want to see at least one you know open source implementation of that spec right doesn't have to be in the cncf but at least you know open source to some definition of open source might be might be another requirement that we want to talk about so just from a procedural perspective because I know this this issue has been lingering for quite a while now um would it be all great topics but would it be possible for us to circle back around to the end user discussion because that's the one topic that I really need to get clarity on for the cloud events project before they can move forward on whether they want a good incubator or not um I just want to get a read from the TSE on what their definition of end user means I would say real users using it in production so it's not just yes it's not just like the spec is implemented by somebody it's people are actually using that implementation of the spec like through foxy say like through like the cloud provider offering the implementation of said spec through and and it being used by its respective end users would be good enough okay that's that's why I assume but it's fine okay thank you yeah do you actually need like company names are people using it or just sort of a statement that says we have three users but I can't tell you who they are I know that that is a problem that um Tufts have raised as well where I think they do have you know several nameable end users now but um you know there would be a number where that becomes hard um but I think yeah we have to maybe take it on a case-by-case basis and there are some private like companies that don't want to be publicly listed and if that's the case maybe for like the case of Tuft maybe that can privately share it with the TSE to um at least prove that there are end users but I know there's some sensitivities about where Tuft is being used okay sounds reasonable thank you one other thing that I'd be interested in you know one scenario that I'm not saying this is happening but just thinking about this problem in general is that if we have a spec and all the users are using a proprietary implementation and then the open source implementation of that spec ends up being sort of window dressing that isn't actually used in production that to me seems like an anti-pattern and something that we don't want to support we don't want like I like we don't want the CNCF to actually sort of be a way to sort of like you know open wash stuff right we want to see real true usage of open systems um so as we think about these criteria that might be something we want to think about yep so does that say that the vendor implementation needs to pass the open source test suite so you kind of prove that it is an implementation of the open source spec well I guess what I'm what I'm trying to say is like you know if we have like a spec and the only implementations that are being used in production are commercial implementations yeah I'm not sure that's a place where we want to be I think it's worth having that discussion I also think we you know you want to think about like if you have two vendors who each say that they implemented and their end users use it that doesn't mean it's actually like there's different ways to to assert that you conform to the spec right like so just because you have a test suite that passes for both vendors doesn't mean the end users that would try to switch vendors would be able to right and so I think there has to be some you know and I would encourage that the project themselves has to assert why they think they're fulfilling this criteria not just ask the TOC to be more specific about the criteria like elaborate a little bit and then we can like and then the TOC can kind of evaluate like okay here's what more of what we'd like to see in this direction yeah and then I think you know it's worth reiterating that there's always a level of judgment with respect to the TOC in these things and so there is no sort of like if you check all the boxes then like everybody hands are tied you automatically get promoted here I think that you know these you know the criteria there are a guideline I think it's a guideline both for the TOC and for the projects but I you know I don't think we're trying to foresee every situation and every you know every possible eventuality here. In your case Joe if there's like a particular spec that you're worried about in that case it would be good to explicitly um I mean nothing off the top of my head I mean as we look at sort of like the the the open traces census stuff I think um you know we had Yeager you know which is our sort of open implementation of this I mean you know I think that making sure that we stay true to that versus actually having this essentially be and again I don't want to call out anybody specifically I don't know all the details there but I think that that's a place where we're seeing a lot of interrupt a lot of vendor you know commercial products associated with it that's all fine and good but I think we we want to make sure that there's at least a path around independent utility that's that's completely open around this thing okay all right I think that's uh added a bit more clarity that we can start trying to write up a bit more clearer yeah all right is that the end I think so when what's what's next yeah q and a I think we have one minute left um the only thing to note is next week we have our project presentation our community presentation session right now there's only weave uh flocks I believe signed up I need to double check but if there's other projects that want to uh take some slots to present next week please reach out to me or Liz and we'll do our best to include you in that project presentation uh meeting next week we actually need to um figure out how we get presentations to the six yeah the other things are getting down yeah yeah it's actually using the six Amy we have Amy well I think once we get more six going it'll be easier to delegate down because we've the the kind of compromise we said is every day now it's just like whatever projects want to show up essentially and and present to kind of get through the backlog at least okay for what it's worth we're going to have um a proof point of this where Longhorn is going to be just looking to present through the search uh in a couple of weeks and then present to the talk straight after that awesome fantastic that's good to hear all right bang on time thank you very much everyone all right bye girl