RESEARCH

I am a literary comparatist, film scholar, and cultural historian by training. My research interest includes modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, performing arts, media, and cultural history. While my research projects cross many disciplines and time periods, they share the same fascination with “performativity” in modern Chinese literature and art, expressed in Chinese writers’ and artists’ intense awareness of the spectators’ gaze, which provides a powerful lens to uncover the ever-changing dynamics among the state, the cultural elite, and the populace since the early twentieth century in China.  

My monograph, Decadence in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Culture: A Comparative and Literary-Historical Reevaluation, uses the original notions of late-nineteenth-century European Decadence as a critical lens to re-examine twentieth-century Chinese literature and to illuminate the changing status of China’s modern cultural elite. I have also published peer-reviewed articles on the photographic representation of modern masculinity in the Liangyou pictorial, the performative mode in Chinese independent documentaries, the cult following of a Hong Kong comedy film in mainland China, cynical idealism in contemporary Chinese experimental theatre, the transformation of country bumkin characters in the satiric skits on CCTV's Spring Festival Gala (1983-present), the uneasy entanglement between contemporary Chinese avant-garde theatre and the socialist legacy, and the constant negotiations between theatrical radicalism and commercial popularization in Chinese avantgarde theatre since the early twentieth century. 

I have three ongoing research interests. One is my second monograph, which examines China's post-socialist condition by zeroing in on the comic portrayal of a variety of cultural Others in the satiric skits on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, arguably the most popular performance in the most-watched show on China’s most-censored television channel since its inception in 1983. The second one is on documentary activism in contemporary China, which studies activist documentary as an independent genre in the context of Chinese independent documentary films and illuminates its aesthetics, politics, and ethics. The third one is on transmedia performativity, particularly the use of live cinema in contemporary Chinese experimental theatre.