Research Projects

My research interests revolve around the history of East Asian and global cinema, exhibitions, and participatory media, associated with atrocity, violence, and witnessing. At the intersection of film studies, media theory, art history, and legal humanities, I study the role of photography, film, video, and emergent media cultures in policing, judging, and social control, with a focus on the weaponization of looking in both Chinese and cross-cultural contexts. My in-progress book project Expose and Punish has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), Library of Congress, Asia Art Archive & the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (CCKF), and Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities. 

1. Expose and Punish: Trial by Media in Revolutionary China and Beyond

   At the heart of the Maoist class struggle, identifying who was part of the Chinese proletarian masses was an urgent and public matter. Whereas many existing studies take for granted the practices associated with class struggle, my book project draws back the curtain on how class struggle was constructed through and of moving images in China. Much emphasis has been put on either the violent components of class war or China’s class struggle as a project in which power was conveyed through displays, spectacles, and performances. However, the intersection of class struggle as both spectacular violence and spectatorial violence remains underexplored. Through exploring the combination of violence and spectacle within an overarching class-coded system, my project argues for the mutual constitution of image making and justice, upon which the project called class struggle was legitimized, in effect produced everyday violence both on and off the screen, within and beyond the exhibition spaces.

   
   

2. Women as Small Data: A Media Archaeology of Slut Shaming in East Asia

   As a critical response to recent slut-shaming rife on Web 2.0 and globally emerging #MeToo movement, the project aims to historicize and theorize the naming and shaming of women through screen media and data visualization across PRC China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other diasporic areas of Sinophone cultural formation. I seek to place various cases of Chinese women on view and on trial, past and present, into a critical conversation that would be otherwise unachievable. Ranging from modern mugshots of female hanjian, Maoist image-based sexual abuse, border-crossing Cold War revenge porn genre, slut shaming through film shot design or social media, female-sourcing artificial intelligence, to digital shame parades of “broken shoes” and women’s justice-seeking within China’s unique internet courts system, those cases offer space for problematizing some dominant views about the faceless patriarchal authority; their interconnection informs contexts that need to be fully grasped before we can begin to understand and reflect on the ongoing mechanism of global rape culture in the age of big data.