Art & Politics of East Asia

(Image courtesy of MUBI.com)

Abstract: Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker series (2012–ongoing) reimagines temporality through the deliberate, meditative walking of a Tang monk, Xuanzang, moving against the backdrop of fast-paced, globalized urban spaces. Drawing on Chan Buddhist aesthetics, the series manifests an alternative temporality that resists the accelerated rhythms imposed by capitalist modernity. This paper argues that Walker’s extreme slowness not only counters the dominant temporal regimes of contemporary life but also addresses postcolonial temporal dysphoria, a condition of temporal dissonance shaped by uneven modernities and global capitalist pressures. By mobilizing and transforming the Chan Buddhist tradition of walking meditation and its emphasis on immediate presence, Walker critiques the regulated, productive time of global capitalism while proposing an alternative mode of existence. The series positions the walking body as a site of temporal, philosophical, and political intervention, enacting a politics of rhythm, slowness, and presence that disrupts the structures of liquid modernity. This paper further examines how Walker introduces a “temporal punk aesthetic,” blending sacred ritual with performance art to generate decolonial alternatives to contemporary temporal orders. Through its hybrid performance, Walker reveals the critical potential of Chan Buddhist aesthetics to reimagine the experience of time and space under global modernity.

Presenter: Sihan Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literary Studies and Asian Languages & Cultures at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literature, culture, and intellectual history, situated within the global modernist studies and world literature. Her broader interests include comparative modernities, aesthetics and religion, multimedia modernism, critical animal studies, Sinophone cinema, and Chinese diasporic culture. Her teaching experience spans topics on Chinese, Sinophone, and East Asian literature, film, popular culture, as well as animal studies.

Discussant: Hang Wu is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her research explores Chinese media history and theory in the eras of broadcasting, digital, and new media. She has published academic work on Chinese animation, cinema, and broadcasting infrastructures in journals and edited volumes such as Animation, Dangdai Dianying (Contemporary Cinema), Sound Communities in the Asia Pacific, and Digital Animalities (forthcoming). Her dissertation examines the role of Chinese martial arts television in the construction of transmedia and transregional storyworlds..

Digital Soundscapes of In-Betweenness: Crisis Documentation Through Global Chinese Podcasting

Friday, November 8th, 3:00–5:00 PM

Presenter: Shiqi Lin (Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow, Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Discussant: Lilian Kong (PhD Student, EALC/CMS, University of Chicago)

Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)

Abstract: This chapter thinks through global Chinese podcasting—a digital audio culture that has grown exponentially since COVID-19—to consider what it means for sound to document a permanent state of crisis and pave alternative futures for global media justice. As COVID-19 continued to unfold and restructure macro and micro levels of global social life, I contend that podcasting stood out for its capacity of “elastic listening,” which allowed for both a condition of close, intimate listening and a state of distracted, anxious listening for a sense of security and refuge. The modest, conversational, episodic, and border-crossing qualities of this hybrid medium, I discuss, enabled podcasting to capture shifting traces of this chronic crisis with a sonic infrastructure of everyday documentation. For this workshop, specifically, I highlight how my working concept, “in-betweenness,” may capture the medium specificity of podcasting for straddling multiple modes of media, transmitting intimacy, and linking together diasporic/global Chinese populations on the air. In a context of growing media fragmentation and political polarization across the world, I conceptualize podcasting as a mode of guerrilla media that continues to shift its form across media platforms, intersect with other forms of storytelling, and carry the weight of social engagement for alternative futures in the making.

Presenter: Shiqi Lin is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Cornell University. Her research interests include Chinese film and media cultures, critical theory, media theory, and global cultural politics. Her current book project examines the rise and shift of different documentary media in the Chinese digital media landscapes in response to post-2008 global social crises. With Xiaobo Yuan, she is the co-editor of a special issue, “Interrogating Futurity in Contemporary China,” for China Perspectives (2023). Her other works have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as positions politics, Foundry, and Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media.

Discussant: Lilian Kong is a PhD Student in Cinema & Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

★This event is also co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with support in part by grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI National Resource Centers program. The event’s content does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and one should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government ★