David Cateforis, associate professor of art history at Kansas University and a specialist in modern and contemporary art, will give a lecture Thursday titled “Wenda Gu’s Forest of Stone Steles: Retranslation and Rewriting of Tang Poetry – Translation as Transformation in the Work of a Contemporary Chinese Installation Artist.” It will be illustrated with digital images and video footage.

The lecture will be at 7 p.m. in the Spencer Museum of Art auditorium.

Wenda Gu’s series consists of 50 hand-carved carved stone steles, each bearing a classic Tang dynasty poem in the original Chinese and in a standard English translation, which Gu then retranslated back into Chinese on the basis of sound rather than meaning, producing nonsense, which he then retranslated back into English, making the nonsense available to the English reader. By accentuating how the original meaning is lost in translation, Gu highlights how such cross-cultural chasms give rise to various dilemmas and problems in the process of globalization.