Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor) in Film Studies, University of Sydney Joint PhD in Cinema and Media Studies & East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
This essay explores the technological aesthetics and politics of the Chinese sci-fi blockbuster T... more This essay explores the technological aesthetics and politics of the Chinese sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019). I focus on how the film stages the presence of the capitalist worldview in a dystopian world by analyzing the rendition of futuristic technologies, achieved through both practical and digital effects. Particular attention is paid to the film’s design, construction, and staging of various types of technological devices, especially the so-called user interface which mediates human-machine interaction. By studying how speculative technologies are operated both in the diegesis and on the site of film shooting through the effects team members’ manual labour, I identify that the film’s production method greatly differs from standard Western industrial practices. The idiosyncrasy of this method, I argue, reverberates with a dominant Chinese visual culture in the age of digital information that aestheticizes labor as a bio-technological collaboration between humans and machines.
In response to ongoing ecological crises, recent turns to animism in ecocriticism have celebrated... more In response to ongoing ecological crises, recent turns to animism in ecocriticism have celebrated a materialist dimension of this worldview that understands the world as a relational mesh collectively formed by agential entities, human and nonhuman alike. But as animism increasingly gets grounded in contemporary concerns and materialism rather than indigeneity and the soulful metaphysics behind the term’s etymology, critiques of its politics emerge as well. By analyzing Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan’s Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind, 1988), this article demonstrates how animism does not need be secularized in order to be ecopolitical.
Screen Bodies: The Journal of Embodiment, Media Arts, and Technology, 2022
This article studies Doku, a digital figure created by multimedia artist Lu Yang. Unlike Lu’s pre... more This article studies Doku, a digital figure created by multimedia artist Lu Yang. Unlike Lu’s previous works that celebrate how virtuality makes possible the fashioning of a formless figure free of bodily restraints and thus of various identity makers, Doku betrays a different take on the potentials of the virtual in relation to the corporeal. By closely examining select videos featuring Doku, I highlight Lu’s emphasis on Doku’s entangled bodily presence and affective intensity. Contextualized against the backdrop of contemporary digital cinema’s engagement with corporeality and of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, these features of Doku invite us to reevaluate Lu’s figuration of digital bodies.
This article reflects on the potential of film criticism for the teaching of global and/or nation... more This article reflects on the potential of film criticism for the teaching of global and/or national film history in undergraduate-level survey courses in cinema and media studies and area studies. I understand film criticism as a formalist approach that students of the moving image can take up in their analysis of a given cinematic text (ranging from a film to a sequence to a shot). The aim of film criticism is to identify and accentuate the specifics of the individual text and further locate its special position in a broader pattern of filmmaking or a historical period. To practice film criticism in a film history class therefore fosters an opposing tension between the singularity of the text and contextual information such as historical background or cinema’s relationship to transnational or regional politics and society. This move, I would suggest, not only helps students develop skills of media literacy, especially close analysis, but also encourages them to question simplified narratives of history, culture, and society that typically characterize textbook accounts of global film history, not least non-Western cinema.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2020
This article studies several shots of large-scale natural disasters (flood, typhoon, volcanic eru... more This article studies several shots of large-scale natural disasters (flood, typhoon, volcanic eruption, and so on) that punctuate Dragonfly Eyes (2017), Chinese artist Xu Bing’s first foray into cinematic production which stitched and edited more than 10000 hours of video footage recorded by surveillance cameras across China and uploaded to cloud storage online. Through the lens of found footage aesthetics and the concept of ecological sublime in recent scholarship--on both the sublimity of nature and the viewing condition of this sublimity afforded by modern technologies—I address the following questions: How do these shots speak to the video’s overall storyline? What do they tell us about the avant-garde practice of found footage film? More crucially, what ecological significance does the video’s peculiar natural aesthetics carry? Paying heed to these aspects of the video, I suggest, helps us open up larger inquiries concerning the search for a suitable means of representing our ecological condition today.
By looking at selected sequences from Wong Kar-wai’s 2013 The Grandmaster in which characters, es... more By looking at selected sequences from Wong Kar-wai’s 2013 The Grandmaster in which characters, especially Gong Er (played by Zhang Ziyi), interact with the ubiquitous falling snow created by particle systems, this essay argues that the film’s effects work visualizes the invisible flow of energy in traditions of Chinese visual culture, medicine and martial arts – all prominent or related motifs in the film’s narrative. Moreover, such energy gets to be envisaged because of the very medium of the particle system, with its ideology closely related to a worldview based on animism and animation. Growing out of Wong’s use of visual effects – specific to the cultural-historical context of the film – and the animist concept behind its technology, I offer a relational perspective for contemporary studies of visual effects to conceptualize the interactions between martial arts actions performed in front of the camera and digital work in the postproduction stage.
In Electric Animal, Akira Mizuta Lippit argues that when animals, understood in traditional Weste... more In Electric Animal, Akira Mizuta Lippit argues that when animals, understood in traditional Western thought as lacking language, become images on film, they are turned into languages or semiotic facilities. Inspired by Lippit’s claim, this study poses four interrelated questions. First, is Lippit referring to the animal in general or to specific kinds of animals? Second, how does cinema enact the process of signification? Third, are animals as filmic elements necessarily turned into signs? Finally, what does it mean for animals to be transformed into signs? I address these questions by tracing the appearances and functions of dogs in early cinema in relation to Tom Gunning’s paradigmatic account of early cinema as a medium of attractions. Certain dogs in film, I argue, function as distractions that disrupt viewers’ absorption into either attractions or narratives and push them into reconsidering the status of the image in relation to their own viewing positions.
This essay explores the technological aesthetics and politics of the Chinese sci-fi blockbuster T... more This essay explores the technological aesthetics and politics of the Chinese sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019). I focus on how the film stages the presence of the capitalist worldview in a dystopian world by analyzing the rendition of futuristic technologies, achieved through both practical and digital effects. Particular attention is paid to the film’s design, construction, and staging of various types of technological devices, especially the so-called user interface which mediates human-machine interaction. By studying how speculative technologies are operated both in the diegesis and on the site of film shooting through the effects team members’ manual labour, I identify that the film’s production method greatly differs from standard Western industrial practices. The idiosyncrasy of this method, I argue, reverberates with a dominant Chinese visual culture in the age of digital information that aestheticizes labor as a bio-technological collaboration between humans and machines.
In response to ongoing ecological crises, recent turns to animism in ecocriticism have celebrated... more In response to ongoing ecological crises, recent turns to animism in ecocriticism have celebrated a materialist dimension of this worldview that understands the world as a relational mesh collectively formed by agential entities, human and nonhuman alike. But as animism increasingly gets grounded in contemporary concerns and materialism rather than indigeneity and the soulful metaphysics behind the term’s etymology, critiques of its politics emerge as well. By analyzing Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan’s Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind, 1988), this article demonstrates how animism does not need be secularized in order to be ecopolitical.
Screen Bodies: The Journal of Embodiment, Media Arts, and Technology, 2022
This article studies Doku, a digital figure created by multimedia artist Lu Yang. Unlike Lu’s pre... more This article studies Doku, a digital figure created by multimedia artist Lu Yang. Unlike Lu’s previous works that celebrate how virtuality makes possible the fashioning of a formless figure free of bodily restraints and thus of various identity makers, Doku betrays a different take on the potentials of the virtual in relation to the corporeal. By closely examining select videos featuring Doku, I highlight Lu’s emphasis on Doku’s entangled bodily presence and affective intensity. Contextualized against the backdrop of contemporary digital cinema’s engagement with corporeality and of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, these features of Doku invite us to reevaluate Lu’s figuration of digital bodies.
This article reflects on the potential of film criticism for the teaching of global and/or nation... more This article reflects on the potential of film criticism for the teaching of global and/or national film history in undergraduate-level survey courses in cinema and media studies and area studies. I understand film criticism as a formalist approach that students of the moving image can take up in their analysis of a given cinematic text (ranging from a film to a sequence to a shot). The aim of film criticism is to identify and accentuate the specifics of the individual text and further locate its special position in a broader pattern of filmmaking or a historical period. To practice film criticism in a film history class therefore fosters an opposing tension between the singularity of the text and contextual information such as historical background or cinema’s relationship to transnational or regional politics and society. This move, I would suggest, not only helps students develop skills of media literacy, especially close analysis, but also encourages them to question simplified narratives of history, culture, and society that typically characterize textbook accounts of global film history, not least non-Western cinema.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2020
This article studies several shots of large-scale natural disasters (flood, typhoon, volcanic eru... more This article studies several shots of large-scale natural disasters (flood, typhoon, volcanic eruption, and so on) that punctuate Dragonfly Eyes (2017), Chinese artist Xu Bing’s first foray into cinematic production which stitched and edited more than 10000 hours of video footage recorded by surveillance cameras across China and uploaded to cloud storage online. Through the lens of found footage aesthetics and the concept of ecological sublime in recent scholarship--on both the sublimity of nature and the viewing condition of this sublimity afforded by modern technologies—I address the following questions: How do these shots speak to the video’s overall storyline? What do they tell us about the avant-garde practice of found footage film? More crucially, what ecological significance does the video’s peculiar natural aesthetics carry? Paying heed to these aspects of the video, I suggest, helps us open up larger inquiries concerning the search for a suitable means of representing our ecological condition today.
By looking at selected sequences from Wong Kar-wai’s 2013 The Grandmaster in which characters, es... more By looking at selected sequences from Wong Kar-wai’s 2013 The Grandmaster in which characters, especially Gong Er (played by Zhang Ziyi), interact with the ubiquitous falling snow created by particle systems, this essay argues that the film’s effects work visualizes the invisible flow of energy in traditions of Chinese visual culture, medicine and martial arts – all prominent or related motifs in the film’s narrative. Moreover, such energy gets to be envisaged because of the very medium of the particle system, with its ideology closely related to a worldview based on animism and animation. Growing out of Wong’s use of visual effects – specific to the cultural-historical context of the film – and the animist concept behind its technology, I offer a relational perspective for contemporary studies of visual effects to conceptualize the interactions between martial arts actions performed in front of the camera and digital work in the postproduction stage.
In Electric Animal, Akira Mizuta Lippit argues that when animals, understood in traditional Weste... more In Electric Animal, Akira Mizuta Lippit argues that when animals, understood in traditional Western thought as lacking language, become images on film, they are turned into languages or semiotic facilities. Inspired by Lippit’s claim, this study poses four interrelated questions. First, is Lippit referring to the animal in general or to specific kinds of animals? Second, how does cinema enact the process of signification? Third, are animals as filmic elements necessarily turned into signs? Finally, what does it mean for animals to be transformed into signs? I address these questions by tracing the appearances and functions of dogs in early cinema in relation to Tom Gunning’s paradigmatic account of early cinema as a medium of attractions. Certain dogs in film, I argue, function as distractions that disrupt viewers’ absorption into either attractions or narratives and push them into reconsidering the status of the image in relation to their own viewing positions.
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