In 2005, the University celebrated the inauguration of the first 8 Endowed Professorships,
a milestone in the University's history.
To date, a total of 120 Endowed Professorships have been established.
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The Hung Hing-Ying Family

Mr and Mrs Hung Hing-Ying Professorship in the Arts

"The arts are an important part of our culture and education. According to the records of the Grand Historian (史記), Confucius taught his students poetry, history, ethical philosophy and music; and these are subjects taught at the Faculty of Arts. As descendants of Confucius, we believe that the arts are a vital component of a university education and it is our wish that the arts in various forms will continue to be taught, promoted and cultivated at HKU and in society through this endowment."

The Hung Hing-Ying Family
Jean Ma

Jean Ma

Appointed in 2023

Daniel K L Chua

Appointed in 2018

It is often said that music is beyond words. But this does not mean that it is without meaning, merely mumbling to itself in the corner of the university. In fact, music is everywhere; it is with everyone in their everyday lives, shaping and accompanying everything we do. So even if music is famously inarticulate, it tacitly gives meaning, makes meaning and, in some cases, is meaning. It is a truly multidisciplinary medium that touches our world, from the vastness of the cosmos to the tiny little dot we call the self; its movement is reflected in the motion of the stars as well as the emotions of the human being; it is feeling and will, both somatic and spiritual; and, in its intellectual history, it has navigated the pages of theology, philosophy, cosmology, physiology, psychology, medicine, physics, biology, mathematics… Music is significant. What Professor Daniel Chua Kwan-Liang tries to do as a musicologist is to bring out in words these meanings that are seemingly beyond words in order to demonstrate how human identity and its forms of knowledge are conditioned by music.

Professor Chua is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Music at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and is also the holder of the Mr and Mrs Hung Hing-Ying Professorship in the Arts. Professor Chua is an internationally renowned musicologist and a recognised expert on Beethoven and the intellectual history of western music. 

Professor Chua has written widely on music: from Monteverdi to Stravinsky; from issues of gender to the question of freedom; and from the analysis of a single chord in the Rite of Spring to the development of a new music theory inspired by NASA's Voyager missions. His work is known for raising social, political, theological and philosophical issues in the study of music history and theory. His research is shaped by a triptych of monographs - The 'Galitzin' Quartets of Beethoven, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning, and Beethoven and Freedom - that focus on the meaning of western music in the formation of the modern self. He illuminates how music is central to the way humanity makes sense of the world. He is currently part of the leadership team of several theologically inflected projects with Yale and Duke Divinity Schools involving music, and is working on a book with a scholar at Harvard modestly entitled Towards an Intergalactic Music Theory of Everything.

As an advocate for the arts at the University, Professor Chua has founded various on-going projects including the Cultural Management Office, the HKU MUSE concert series, the Advanced Cultural Leadership Programme, Faith and Global Engagement, the Centre for Humanities and Medicine, and the Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities. As a publically engaged academic, he has held dialogues with thought leaders and major cultural practitioners, including Ang Lee, Evgeny Kissin, Tony Blair, Angela Hewitt, Yip Wing-Sie, Canon Andrew White, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Lang Lang.

He earned his BA, MPhil and PhD in music from the University of Cambridge. Before joining HKU to head the School of Humanities, he was a Fellow and Director of Studies at St John's College, Cambridge, and later a Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King's College London. He was a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Yale University (2014-15), a Henry Fellow at Harvard University (1992-93), and a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (1993-97). He was the recipient of the 2004 Royal Musical Association's Dent Medal. He was the Editor of Music & Letters, and is a member of major advisory and editorial boards, and has served on the European Research Council grant panel, and Board of the Hong Kong Philharmonic. In 2017, he was elected as the first non-European President of the International Musicological Society in its 90-year history, representing the recognition of Asia as a vital scholarly force within the discipline and highlighting the University on the musicological map.