Thesis: Bio-imaginaries: The Art of China and Its Diasporas in the Biotech Era (1989-Present)
My research focuses on how biotechnology— understood as the technological use of biological reproduction and transgenic practices, and of biosecurity and life-control systems—expands artistic imaginaries pertaining to the body, race, gender, sexuality, and ecology within transnational Chinese cultures from the late 1980s to the present day. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the body has increasingly been defined in biomedical, biotechnical, and biopolitical terms. This has led to a renewed focus on the body, understood through the molecular interfaces of genetic, endocrine, and immune systems. The global health crisis has witnessed a proliferation of disease imaginaries and metaphors that associate the invisible viral agents with visible identity markers, often centred around gender and race. This new condition invites a reassessment of the ways in which biopower operates on the body and the implications of ‘biologised’ notions of identity when viewed through historical and socio-political lenses.
Delving into an array of artistic imaginaries in response to genome editing, agricultural biotechnology, assisted reproductive technologies, eugenics, hormone replacement therapy, disease outbreak narratives, bio-surveillance, and viral infection in the works of six artists—Li Shan, LuYang, Jes Fan, Candice Lin, Angela Su, and Pei-Ying Lin— my thesis offers a nuanced examination of the implications of chimerical hybridity, boundary-crossing, porosity, and fluidity for the body and human identity, shaped under biotechnological conditions within multiple geopolitical and cultural contexts. These contexts are studied in relation to the transforming society of socialist and post-socialist China, the migratory, diasporic, and minority experiences of Chinese communities in Europe and America, and the unique cultural, social, and political circumstances of Hong Kong and Taiwan as marginal, subordinated city/ state.
Education
- PhD History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art
- MA History of Art, University College London
- BA History of Art, University College London
Teaching
- Associate Lecturer, MA Global China: Contemporary Chinese Art and Infrastructure, 2024/25
- Associate Lecturer, BA2 Beyond the Great Wall: Mapping Contemporary Art on the ‘New Silk Road’
- Associate Lecturer for BA3 Lessons in Critical Interpretation 2022/23
- Spring 2020: Guest Lecturer, Global China (MA)
- Autumn and Spring term 2019: Teaching Assistant for BA 2 Frameworks for Interpretation
Publications
- Technology of the Self: Cerebral Subject and the Buddhist Mind in LuYang’s Fantastical Work (book chapter in preparation)
- ‘Home(sickness),’ on Chris Zhongtian Yuan’s solo exhibition at Tabula Rasa Gallery, 2024
- ‘Art after Pandemic: Reimagining Virus in Pei-Ying Lin’s Virophilia‘, in Séagh Kehoe, Gerda Wielander (eds.) 2022. Cultural China 2021: The Contemporary China Centre Review (University of Westminster Press (UWP))
- Dis(Embodying) Biomolecular Sex: The Lapse of Identity in Jes Fan’s Hormone Works (2017-2018), The Courtauld’s Gender and Sexuality Research Group, 2020
- ‘Doubting Sex: Examining the Biomedical Gaze in Lu Yang’s Uterus Man (2013)’, immediations. No. 17, 2020
- ‘Gender in Chinese Contemporary Art’, Tate Research Centre: Asia, 2018
Research Interests
- Contemporary art and visual culture
- Gender, sexuality, and race
- Feminist and queer technoscience
- Visual medical humanities
- Contagion, disease, and immune system discourses
- Sinophone studies, colonial histories, postcolonial theory, and globalisation
- Parafiction
Conferences and Other Events
- Co-organiser, ‘The Open Mesh of Possibilities: Examining the Queer Potential of Textiles in Art. Sarah Zapata and LJ Roberts in Conversation, moderated by Dr. Joseph McBrinn,’ in partnership with the Barbican Art Gallery, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 13 May, 2024.
- ‘Violent Intimacy: A Minoritarian Semiotics of Contamination in Jes Fan’s Work.’ Energies of Attachment: Mapping Intimacy across Art, Science and Ecology, The Asymmetry International Symposium 2023, 1 December 2023.
- Session Co-convenor, Viral Images: Art and Contagion. 2022 Annual Conference, Association for Art History.
- Panel Discussion: Neti Neti, Zabludowicz Collection, 2022
- Co-organiser, ‘A History of Future Contagion’: Candice Lin and Neel Ahuja in conversation, The Courtauld in partnership with Spike Island, Bristol, 14 March 2022.
- ‘Contagious Bodies: Epidemic Imaginaries and the Making of Queer Kinship in the Works of Candice Lin and Jes Fan,’ Princeton Art & Archaeology Graduate Symposium. 2022.
- ‘Performing a Viral Future: Immune Ecologies, Animacies, and the Making of the Microbial Body in Pei-Ying Lin’s Virophilia (2018-ongoing).’ Embodying Local Knowledges Critical Ecologies Symposium. Organised by Wanwu Group (City University of Hong Kong) and Taipei National University of the Arts. 13 November 2021.
- Panel co-convenor. Japanese Art in the Ecological Predicament: Collaborations in the Age of Crisis. EAJS conference, Ghent, 25-28 August 2021.
- Gallery talk in response to Yu Ji’s exhibition Wasted Mud, Chisenhale Gallery, 26 June 2021.
- ‘Performing a Viral Future: The Making of the Microbial Body and the Situated Knowledge of Virus in Pei-Ying Lin’s Virophilia (2018-ongoing)’, Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Entanglements Online Workshop, 27 March 2021.
- ‘Palaeontology of the Present: “The Roots of Life” in Li Shan’s Genetic Art’, Third Year PhD Symposium (The Courtauld Institute of Art), October 2020
- ‘Doubting Sex: Examining the Biomedical Gaze in Lu Yang’s UterusMan (2013)’, Dimensions of the Modern: Exploring Critical Approaches (The Courtauld Institute of Art), June 2019
- Co-organiser, ‘Wording Art History: Negotiating the Global and the Local’, Modern and Contemporary Postgraduate Colloquium at The Courtauld Institute of Art, 17 March 2018
- ‘With or without nature?- Ecological criticism in Wen-ying Tsai’s Cybernetic sculpture system’, 2018 EACS conference, University of Glasgow
Other Activities
- Research Associate, Barbican Art Gallery, 2022-2023
- Editorial Board, immediations, the peer-reviewed postgraduate journal of the Courtauld Institute of Art, 2019
- Research Assistant to Dr Wenny Teo, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art