The Tan Lark Sye Professorship in Chinese Language and Culture (The Professorship) was established in 1998 by the Association of Nanyang University Graduates in commemoration of the late founder of Nanyang University (Nantah), Mr. Tan Lark Sye, and to honour him for his great contributions to education and celebrate the centenary of his birth in 1997. All the funds raised through the Professorship are managed by Nanyang Technological University (NTU). The mission of the Professorship is to pass down and spread the convictions of Mr. Tan Lark Sye and our forefathers in setting up the university and schools so as to promote the research and development of the Chinese language and culture studies. The interest income of the Professorship is mainly used to invite internationally renowned scholars to deliver public lectures and conduct academic seminars in order to benefit the general public and raise social awareness and concern for the issues with regards to the Chinese language and culture. It also strives to make NTU the research hub for the studies of Chinese language and culture in Southeast Asia.

Professor Max Xiaobing Tang graduated from Peking University in 1984 and obtained his Ph.D. degree in Literature from Duke University in 1991. From 1991 to 2008, he taught at the University of Colorado (Boulder), the University of Chicago, and the University of Southern California. He was Helmut F. Stern Professor of Modern Chinese Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 2008 and 2019. Since September 2019, Professor Tang has been serving as Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Professor Tang’s research and scholarly work focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, visual culture, history of art, sound studies, and cultural politics. His English publications include Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford UP, 1996), Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Duke UP, 2000), Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (California UP, 2008), and Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts (Cambridge UP, 2015). The most recent volume was published in Chinese in 2018 and Korean in 2020 respectively. Professor Tang’s Chinese publications include his translation Postmodernism and Theories of Culture: Lectures by Professor Fredric Jameson (1986) and an edited volume Re-reading: The People’s Literature and Art Movement and Its Ideology (1993).