Visual Culture Workshops and Conferences
Surfaces in Chinese Visual Culture
Monday 25 May 2026, 09:45-17:50
Panel 1, 10:00–12:20
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Li Jinying (Brown University): The Virtual Walls
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Gerda Wielander (University of Westminster): Seeing, Feeling, Knowing: Reading China's "Open Air Galleries" Through Three Overlapping Frames
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Sun Han (University of Oxford): White Heiti Characters on Red Background: Residues of the Socialist Visual Experience
Panel 2, 13:20–15:00
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Chen Jianqing (Washington University): Four Dialectics of the Touchscreen from a Chinese Perspective
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Yuan Yan (Huazhong University of Science and Technology): Texture: Another Universe of Technical Image
Panel 3, 15:30–17:50
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Ming Tak Ted Hui (University of Oxford): Itching to Sensationalise: Semantic Shifts of yang in Premodern Chinese Literature
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Raffaela Rettinger (University of Wuerzburg): Writing on Skin with Needled Brushes: Decorative Tattooing Practices in Premodern China
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Julius Kochan (University of Oxford): "White Skin and Rosy Cheeks" (白里透红): The Changing Language of Skin Whitening in Contemporary China
Nanyang and New Cultural Regionalities in Chinese Studies
Friday June 6th, 2025: 10:30-15:00
Speakers
Jannis Jizhou Chen (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) "Apocalypse from the Borderland: The Hodopoetics of Tong Mo’s Southwest Imagination"
Yeo Min Hui (Nanyang Technological University) "An Exotic Turn: The Emergence of Nanyang-as-Other in Hong Kong Cinema"
Tan Li Wen Jessica (Lingnan University) "Caught between Homelands: Rethinking the Chinese Socialist Bildungsroman"
Cheow Thia Chan (National University of Singapore) "Enacting a Global Contemporary: Wang Anyi and Regional Intimacies in the Sinophone South"
Solitude and Community in Contemporary Chinese Culture
Wednesday May 15 2024, 10:00-17.30 BST
The relationship between solitude and community resonates across the making of culture: creativity is often seeded in the tranquillity of solitude; but it also blooms in spaces of community. In the aftermath of China’s strict Zero-COVID, policy, when millions of people were confined to their homes for months in states of isolation, questions about this intersection between being alone and being together are more pertinent than ever.
This workshop focusses in particular on the insights their relationship offers into the ways in which seemingly disparate makers of culture navigate uncertainty in China and Hong Kong today. Placing the loneliness of the prison cell alongside solitary spectatorship of censored documentaries; linking online communities of transnational authors to the network of world-cities in which they live; and exploring the overlapping tensions between being singular and plural in contemporary poetry, this workshop shows how community and solitude, as multi-media and multi-scalar concepts, illuminate the bonds of sociality in uncertain times.
Speakers
Federico Picerni (University of Bologna) "Solitude and Community, Singular and Plural, Poet and Class: Overlaps in Workers’ Poetry”
Margaret Hillenbrand (University of Oxford) “Digital Documentaries, Solitary Spectatorship”
Pang Laikwan (Chinese University of Hong Kong) “Writing Behind Bars: The Fandom That Queers Our Political Subjectivity”
Carwyn Morris (Leiden University) “In the Shadow of the World City: City Identity and Community in China”
Huang Qian (University of Groningen) “Chinese Female Transnational-Romance Content Creators’ Cautious Labor in Daily Production and Community Management”
Conference on Chinese Art and Literature in the Republican Era and Beyond: An Event in Honour of Paul Bevan (2023)
Wednesday 14th June, 2023, 09:30-17.30 BST
To thank Dr Paul Bevan for his teaching at Oxford over the previous years and to celebrate his research, exhibitions, translations, and publications focussing on Chinese art and literature of the Republican era, a one-day conference in his honour took place at the China Centre, University of Oxford.
Keynote, 9:30-10:30
Paul Bevan "Behold the Man: George Grosz – the Reception of his Work in China and
Japan, 1923-1937"
Panel 1, 11:00-12.30
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Craig Clunas "The Influence of the Republican Era on Ming Art"
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Xuelei Huang "The Perfumed and the Libidinal: An Olfactory Revolution of the Body in Republican China"
Panel 2, 14:00-15:30
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Anne Witchard "Si-Lan Chen’s Red Shoes"
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Jeremy Taylor "Imagining 'Central China' under Occupation: The Wang Jingwei Regime and the Visualisation of the Lower Yangtze Landscape in Wartime"
Panel 3, 16:00-17:30
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Annabella Massey "'Enzymes of the Soul': Sickness Narratives and the Wounded Healer in Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues"
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Margaret Hillenbrand "Read My Mind: Facial Recognition Technology and Contemporary Chinese Portraiture"
Visual Cultures and Cultures of Reading in the PRC
Oxford-Freiburg Workshop for PhDs and ECRs
18th-19th May, 2023
Day 1
Panel 1, 10:30-12:00
Emily Graf “Incommensurable Worlds of Health in Can Xue’s Barefoot Doctor (2019)”
Annabella Massey “‘Enzymes of the Soul’: Sickness Narratives and the Wounded Healer in Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues”
Panel 2, 13:30-15:00
EveY.Lin “Consumer Culture as Visual Culture in Contemporary Chinese Bookstores”
William Blythe “The Dangers of Knowing Too Much: Self-Censorship and Encyclopaedism in Qian Zhongshu’s Private Notebooks”
Panel 3, 15:30-17:00
Lara Y. Yang “Virtual Dust: Digitalised Images as Research Materials in Confucius dotcom Era China”
Ziru Chen “The Unsettled Directorship of Meishi Street”
