By Kellee Tsai, Dean of Humanities and Social Science, HKUST

Good morning everyone, I am Kellee Tsai, on behalf the School of Humanities and Social Science here at HKUST. I am delighted to welcome all of you from around the world to the Inaugural Conference of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies. This conference has been years in the making thanks to the initiative and dedication of Professor Daisy Du in our Division of Humanities, I know that ACAS originally planned to host a relatively intimate conference here on campus last year; but like everything else, here we are on Zoom.

One of the advantages of this adjustment is that this inaugural conference has a much larger audience than we typically have, and rather than being concentrated in a couple of intense days, today is just the beginning of nearly five months of showcasing both senior and junior scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Chinese animation studies. In some ways, it is more like a festival or a film series than a still shot of all the exciting scholarship and creative interventions that our invited speakers will be sharing over the next several months.

Like a semester-long seminar, I expect that you are thinking about various aspects of Chinese animation will involve. And the papers that speakers promised to present later in the conference will be completed and enriched by the conversations that occur in real-time and through the ACAS blog. Chinese animation itself is rapidly evolving with exciting new directions and by the time this conference wraps up, we might even all be fascinated.

I am so incredibly proud that our school is able to bring such a rich and diverse range of experts together to appreciate the development of Chinese animation. From its inception during the 1930s, all the way through the contemporary digital era, thanks to all of you for tuning in and supporting one another in the ACAS community. Enjoy the conference!