This mini-conference presents the early outcomes of “Playing Heaven”—an inter-university collaboration among scholars based in Hong Kong and Singapore, supported by Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute. The project seeks to enrich the intellectual and cultural history of early modern East Asia with the development of a domain-specific compound artificial intelligence (AI) system. Our objective is to approach schools of thought, literary movements, and embodied disciplines as historical formations, rather than as a priori categories to be imposed onto corpora. To pursue this aim requires grappling with several persistent challenges: (1) the concurrent examination of traditions that modern academic disciplines separate into philosophy, literature, religion, and the performing arts; (2) the extensive linguistic and stylistic range of literary Sinitic; (3) the empirical reconstruction of lineages and movements without defaulting to inherited taxonomies; (4) the methodological tension between close reading of canonical works and the need to craft careful generalizations; and (5) the tracing of flows of knowledge, taste, and sensibility—both those articulated explicitly in extant primary sources and those that remain tacit. Integrating large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) into this research presents an opportunity to model complex processes of intellectual practice and cultural transmission. The purpose is not merely to automate textual analysis but to widen the interpretive field and deepen the epistemic sophistication of historical inquiry.

From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Neo-Confucian philosophy flourished alongside diverse literary and somatic traditions. Literary Sinitic, more commonly known as classical Chinese, operated as the lingua franca of East Asia. In practice, the production, circulation, and reception of cultural practices varied across local adaptations and changing senses of prestige, moral values, and aesthetic judgment. Philosophical lineages were often assembled retrospectively to serve political and institutional agendas, while literary and artistic forms evolved through a mixture of emulation, standardization, and experimentation. The rise of vernacular literature, the spread of bilingual Manchu–Sinitic publications, and the efflorescence of nativist, philological, and antiquarian projects in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam further complicate the convenient yet misleading notion of a unified Sinosphere. Closer inspection reveals a world shaped by selective appropriation, periodic consolidation into formal schools, and eventual dispersion—and, at times, by intellectual and cultural movements that remained fragmented, latent, and only partially expressed.

The project draws inspiration from Su Shi’s 蘇軾 (1037–1101) appraisal of the painter Wen Tong 文同 (1019–1079), whose work was said to embody “the complete bamboo in the breast” (胸有成竹). Still invoked across East Asia, the phrase describes the artist’s effortless rendering of a bamboo’s full lifecycle—germination, flourish, decay, renewal—such that its depiction flows naturally onto paper without mechanical imitation or fixation on essences. The artist’s brushwork responds to the bamboo’s unfolding under changing conditions, rendering the ceaseless transformations attributed to Heaven’s natural processes through informed co-creation. For “Playing Heaven,” this sensibility serves as a methodological guide: representation as active engagement with flux.

Mini-Conference Format

The mini-conference consists of three sessions. First, research presentations for domain experts in East Asian intellectual and cultural history outline current challenges in the field and explore how AI might help address them. Second, a hackathon introduces participants to the unsupervised, semi-supervised, retrieval-augmented, and agentic approaches the “Playing Heaven” team has employed to advance our goals and invites the DH2026 community to propose solutions to outstanding difficulties. A highlight of this session is our collective effort to map classical Chinese texts according to their stylistic as well as semantic features. Finally, a roundtable brings together local and regional specialists in the Confucian tradition and cultural-analytics experts among DH2026 participants for an extended discussion of how computational methods might deepen our understanding of traditional East Asian culture.

This DH2026 mini-conference constitutes the second part of the Playing Heaven team’s project launch, scheduled to take place on 28 July 2026. (The first project launch event is scheduled to be held at the University of Hong Kong on 1 June 2026.