By Andrew G. Cohen, Director of HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study, HKUST

Good morning or perhaps good evening, depending on your current location, and greetings from Hong Kong. Thank you all for joining this Inaugural Conference of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies, and welcome to HKUST. The HKUST Institute for Advanced Study is pleased to be able to co-host the ACAS conference bringing together animators and scholars from diverse disciplines, to promote the study of Chinese animation to the broader academic community.

Well, I had hoped to welcome all of you in person here in Hong Kong, I am nevertheless excited to extend my hospitality, if only virtually. Over the course of the next few weeks, more than 70 speakers from around the world will share their expertise in various aspects of Chinese animation, on subjects as diverse as the early black-and-white shorts produced nearly a century ago, to the most recent CGI and VR animations.

At the Institute for Advanced Study, we believe it is important to recognize the connection between the arts and sciences, and our programs have always emphasized the creative commonalities of scientific research and artistic expression. This conference offers an opportunity to further explore this connection. Science and technology have always played an important role in shaping and enabling transformation in the arts and the humanities, and it is my firm belief that the arts and humanities, in turn, have played an important role in shaping the development of science and technology. I look forward to learning more about the subject myself during the course of this meeting.

Finally, let me express my gratitude to our local organizer, Professor Daisy Du; and especially to all of you, our participants from around the world, who are managing the difficult current situation in order to join us. Stay safe, and I hope that I will be able to welcome you to the next ACAS conference physically in Hong Kong in the not-too-distant future.