More about My Research

Projects in progress:

Some of my ongoing projects explore (1) the lighting effects in the current cyberpunk new wave and the Asian global cities as a cyberscape that processes information; (2) the material history and aesthetics of special effects and digital effects in monster movies.

Works that I have done:

Many of my published works center on the media culture of socialist China–a topic that has always been very fascinating to me. These works include my master’s thesis that examines the role of the animal in the formation of the ideal socialist subject (the 1940s-70s), a book chapter on ditai 敌台, radio broadcasting, and media infrastructure, as well as an essay on puppet filmmaking and the theorization of animation of socialist realism. Besides, I have also published on contemporary Chinese animation and visual effects, translocalizing Hong Kong animation, and the history of Hokkien-language films during the Cold War.

How do I contextualize my research:

I situate my research at the intersection of media studies and area studies (East Asian Studies). The knowledge productions of both fields have been historically informed by a Eurocentric-universalist order, positioning one as the universal/global and the other as the particular/local. Recent scholarship in these two fields, nonetheless, has been challenging this racialized mode of classification, calling forth new forms of knowledge to rethink media and the area by drawing on critical notions such as assemblages and entanglements, infrastructural fragmentations, maps, tracing, and cartographies. I believe that this interdisciplinary intervention has become increasingly relevant in the contemporary moment to consider the potentials and failed promises of new and digital media technologies and global capitalism. I also take this transition of knowledge production as the starting point of my research.

Why I am particularly interested in bringing in the more-than-human animal:

Normative studies of media technologies and geopolitical forms tend to take the human individual (the national/regional individual) as the point of departure without questioning the assumption of the liberal sovereign subject. This normative tendency not only generates the humanistic way of conceiving media and the technical being as ontologically inferior to the human, it also leads to the anthropological problem of objectivating human beings (of certain areas/races) as an object of knowledge to be grasped. I am interested in how the more-than-human may help to rethink about media technologies and sovereignty from a different way, as it often evokes affective relations, forms of play, and transindividual forces that allow for a politics based on mutual inclusion.