Integrative Well-Being Prize Winner – Miao Chen and Lu Zheng

🌿 Integrative Well-Being Prize Winner – Miao Chen and Lu Zheng  🌿

The Center for Buddhist Studies is pleased to recognize Miao Chen and Lu Zheng as recipients of the inaugural Integrative Well-Being Prize.

Miao Chen is a Ph.D. student in East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona whose research explores Third-World digital media culture and the intersection of spectrality and critical infrastructure. An award-winning filmmaker and theater artist, she integrates scholarly research with creative production across China and internationally. She holds a B.A. from Beijing Normal University and an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Southern California.

Lu Zheng is a curator and interdisciplinary artist, also a Ph.D. student in East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. Trained at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, Lu works across sculpture, installation, photography, and performance, with exhibitions presented internationally. Their academic research focuses on contemporary participatory art and theater in China, emphasizing collaboration, audience engagement, and site-specific practice.

 

🏆 Awarded Project:
Object Theatre, Memory, and Emptiness: A Buddhist-Informed Workshop on Transformative Well-Being

This innovative workshop project draws on Buddhist concepts of dependent co-arising (pratītya-samutpāda) and emptiness (śūnyatā) to explore how memories, emotions, and objects exist as relational processes rather than fixed essences. Participants bring personal objects from their past and, within the convivial setting of a tea gathering, collaboratively create a symbolic “memory cake.” Through object theatre and guided reflection, old memories are externalized into performative scenes, enabling identification, expression, and emotional transformation within a trauma-informed and carefully bounded environment.

By weaving together mediated memory, mythic imagination, and collective creativity, the workshop cultivates a shared space where nostalgia becomes not a site of fixation but of metamorphosis. In this “TV wonderland,” participants explore how Buddhism may be embodied and mediated in contemporary artistic practice—transforming symptomatic nostalgia into communal insight and reimagining space, media, and selfhood through the horizon of śūnyatā.

Congratulations to Miao and Lu for this imaginative and deeply integrative contribution to well-being.