Siying Duan is a postdoc fellow at School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University. Her research interest focuses mainly on the study of media arts from a perspective of Chinese Aesthetics. She has earned her Ph.D. in Art Theory at Shanghai Film Academy, Shanghai University. She is also the producer of the podcast channel “Elephant says” at the platform Creative Disturbance and the editor of the bilingual journal Critical Theory.
Siying has visited the University of California, Irvine (UCI), University of Manchester and University College Cork (UCC). She has been served as board member for Body of Knowledge conference and selected as an outstanding Leonardo Peer Reviewer of Leonardo journal. Her publications include papers on Chinese Media Art research, comparative aesthetics, and art psychology.
This chapter is about meaningful connection in media entertainment in relation to the concept of ... more This chapter is about meaningful connection in media entertainment in relation to the concept of resonance during an era of social and technological acceleration. A hierarchical model is proposed with a desire for pleasure at the concrete foundation and an aesthetic appreciation of meaning at the more abstract and universal level. This range of experience is examined in the context of Greek and Chinese thinking about resonance. For Ancient Greeks, resonance describes interpretative and expressive events where concrete bodily and immersive practices shape experiences that may have ethical and sociopolitical effects. In Plato, it branched into (1) passive reception that mirrors a copy and offers no direct access to truth but might merely condition a person or (2) a communion that reveals the ideal. Aristotle stressed the dynamics of resonance in theater to build a relatively autonomous agent who appreciates and reflects on ways that causes affect human action in the social world. In t...
This article introduces the unique Asian film technique of the “empty shot” ( kong jingtou 空镜头) f... more This article introduces the unique Asian film technique of the “empty shot” ( kong jingtou 空镜头) from the perspective of Chinese philosophical thought and aesthetics. In Chinese cinema, the “empty shot” is understood as a shot comprised of nonhuman subjects, distinct from both the establishing shot and the cutaway. Perhaps due to the lack of understanding of its philosophical grounding, the “empty shot” has not received much attention in Anglophone film studies, and has been criticized as an overgeneralised concept. This article first relates the “empty shot” to the more widely accepted “pillow shot” in Anglophone studies of Japanese cinema. This article aims to make visible a non-anthropocentric worldview conveyed through the “empty shot”, and to make space for the potentialities of this film device, which may also be found in non-Chinese cinemas. It explains the “empty shot”’s central features: firstly, its visible scenes are imbued with invisible emotion, leaving space for the aud...
Exploration and Free Views/探索与争鸣, reproduced in Digest of Foreign Social Sciences/社会科学文摘, 2019 (3) and Theory Weekly of Being Daily/北京日报理论周刊, 2019-03-18., 2019
This chapter is about meaningful connection in media entertainment in relation to the concept of ... more This chapter is about meaningful connection in media entertainment in relation to the concept of resonance during an era of social and technological acceleration. A hierarchical model is proposed with a desire for pleasure at the concrete foundation and an aesthetic appreciation of meaning at the more abstract and universal level. This range of experience is examined in the context of Greek and Chinese thinking about resonance. For Ancient Greeks, resonance describes interpretative and expressive events where concrete bodily and immersive practices shape experiences that may have ethical and sociopolitical effects. In Plato, it branched into (1) passive reception that mirrors a copy and offers no direct access to truth but might merely condition a person or (2) a communion that reveals the ideal. Aristotle stressed the dynamics of resonance in theater to build a relatively autonomous agent who appreciates and reflects on ways that causes affect human action in the social world. In t...
This article introduces the unique Asian film technique of the “empty shot” ( kong jingtou 空镜头) f... more This article introduces the unique Asian film technique of the “empty shot” ( kong jingtou 空镜头) from the perspective of Chinese philosophical thought and aesthetics. In Chinese cinema, the “empty shot” is understood as a shot comprised of nonhuman subjects, distinct from both the establishing shot and the cutaway. Perhaps due to the lack of understanding of its philosophical grounding, the “empty shot” has not received much attention in Anglophone film studies, and has been criticized as an overgeneralised concept. This article first relates the “empty shot” to the more widely accepted “pillow shot” in Anglophone studies of Japanese cinema. This article aims to make visible a non-anthropocentric worldview conveyed through the “empty shot”, and to make space for the potentialities of this film device, which may also be found in non-Chinese cinemas. It explains the “empty shot”’s central features: firstly, its visible scenes are imbued with invisible emotion, leaving space for the aud...
Exploration and Free Views/探索与争鸣, reproduced in Digest of Foreign Social Sciences/社会科学文摘, 2019 (3) and Theory Weekly of Being Daily/北京日报理论周刊, 2019-03-18., 2019
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