Research Projects

This project critically examines the figuration of oceans, seas, rivers, and bodies of water in contemporary Asian literary and cultural narratives in English and vernacular languages. While liquid and watery forms have garnered considerable attention in the emergent field of the blue humanities or the oceanic humanities, they have not attained systematic analyses within Asian literary and cultural studies. Adopting an inter-Asian framework, this project probes how Asian writers and cultural producers animate oceanic genres, forms, and images in order to articulate modes of affiliation that exceed imperial and national structures of power. In so doing, the project traces how aesthetic forms of inter-Asia incorporate culturally specific and socially situated oceanic thoughts as part of their efforts to repair and restore fractured human-ocean ties. Foregrounding the watery as material and symbolic spaces, this project addresses a series of interrelated questions: How does oceanic thinking contest aerial and terrestrial modes of knowing Asia? How do Asian artisans and cultural workers register aquatic imaginaries in their formal and rhetorical designs? To what extent have indigenous sea cosmologies inflected artistic expressions of human-marine relationships? My wager is that aesthetic objects from Asia offer rich thematic and formal resources that unsettle imperial and instrumental regimes of knowledge production and return us to sustainable forms of co-habitation amidst ongoing marine crises in the age of the Anthropocene.

Perfect Enlightenment, also known as the state of complete enlightenment. From the 11th to the 15th century, the ideology and belief in Perfect Enlightenment nourished numerous artistic and literary canons in East Asia. In the early Northern Song Dynasty, the Zen master Xuedou infused the concept of Perfect Enlightenment into the imagery of a bright moon, using his hundred poems about the moon to dissolve the solitude of wandering monks and creating new literary imagery and functions. In the mid-Northern Song Dynasty, Yang Jie was the first to incorporate the bright moon into his “Ode to Herding Bulls,” depicting the state of Perfect Enlightenment through painting. In the 10th year of the Chunxi era in the Southern Song Dynasty (1083), Emperor Xiaozong annotated the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment from a pure Zen perspective, named the Jing Mountain Xingsheng Wanshou Temple, and built the Perfect Enlightenment Pavilion, establishing belief in Perfect Enlightenment as a state religion. Subsequently, the four major Perfect Enlightenment grotto temples emerged one after another in the Tongchuan Prefecture. Among them, the Sacred Site of Perfect Enlightenment at the Dazu Mount Baoding has two reliefs of the bright moon, and the inscription “Storehouse of Brilliance.” In the mid-Kamakura period, the Regent Hojo Tokimune built the Perfect Enlightenment Zen Temple and the Brilliance Hall in Kamakura, Japan. In the early Joseon Dynasty, King Sejo built the Perfect Enlightenment Zen Temple, the Brilliance Hall, and the Perfect Enlightenment Pagoda in Hanseong. In the early period of the Second Shō Dynasty of the Ryukyu Kingdom, King Shō Shin built the Perfect Enlightenment Zen Temple and the Perfect Enlightenment Pond in Shuri. Similar to the mindset of Emperor Xiaozong, whenever the country is in decline and in need of rebuilding its national faith, East Asian monarchies often choose the belief of Perfect Enlightenment. As a result, there are four major Perfect Enlightenment temples established as national religious spaces. These artistic and literary paradigms practice and convey the belief of Perfect Enlightenment through imagination, visual representation, and spatial experiences. This project aims to conduct a comprehensive study of the phenomenon group mentioned above for the first time using the approach of “History of East Asian Artistic and Literary Thought Originating from Religion.”

Autofiction has become a central facet of 21st-century Anglophone literature. By using (and disputing) the term “autofiction,” writers, publishers, readers, and critics have produced a new literary mode. Yet few have a clear sense of what this literary event means: muddled definitions and mixed feelings prevail. Some see autofiction as a simple hybrid—part autobiography, part fiction. Others stipulate that in autofiction, author, narrator, and protagonist must share a name and biography. Some are intrigued when writers put themselves at stake in their work. Others lament that the novel’s imaginative capacities should be reduced to gossip. Despite these differences, the event of autofiction has become impossible to ignore. In gathering preliminary data for this project, we identified more than two thousand different literary texts which have been described as autofiction. Some autofictional works are becoming canonical, with their authors winning prizes and posts. Because autofiction provides analytical leverage on contemporary literature as such, it matters for criticism. Autofictions are necessarily stories about writers and writing, and they articulate the lived experience of constructing the literary field, from enacting authorship on social media to experiencing precarity in the humanities. Finally, autofictional texts matter because they pervasively attend to central concerns of contemporary literary studies: ethical-political relationships with friends, strangers, and communities; more-than-human relationships with animals, materialities, and environments. Still, problems of novelty and definition mean that criticism of autofiction in English remains scattered and selective. We therefore begin by empirically investigating the emergence of autofiction as a concept and practice. Who writes autofiction, who publishes it, and who reads it? Who uses the word, and how? How has autofiction become an event in English-language literatures? To answer these questions and take criticism in new directions, we turn to the tools of computational literary studies (CLS). CLS is an aspect of digital humanities which adopts methods from corpus linguistics and natural language processing to understand literature. Collecting several hundred core autofictional texts, we digitize these works and conduct a comprehensive, multidimensional quantitative analysis. We employ established word frequency and genre analysis metrics, as well as more experimental techniques based on artificial intelligence and large language models. Ultimately, our project is cutting-edge not only because it provides new insight into an emerging genre, but because it offers a case study for what criticism can become when humanists take advantage of new reading and research technologies.

The structure of the Ming chuanqi drama carries significant importance in its composition. During the late Ming Dynasty, these dramas often comprised thirty or even sixty acts. The organisation and structuring of such lengthy chuanqi drama became a concern for literati playwrights of the time. Previous studies have indicated that the structure of the eight-legged essay affected the construction of literati chuanqi dramas. For instance, the drama criticism of Jin Shengtan and the drama theory of Li Yu, which emerged in the early Qing Dynasty, drew inspiration from the structure of the eight-legged essay. Nevertheless, it remains unknown whether the composition of chuanqi dramas during the late Ming Dynasty, before the emergence of Jin’s criticism and Li’s theory, was also inspired by the structure of the eight-legged essay. Furthermore, previous discussions on the relationship between the eight-legged essay and the chuanqi drama structure often highlighted that the four-fold structure, i.e. introduction (qi), elucidation (cheng), transition (zhuan), and conclusion (he), as well as the symmetrical structures presented in chuanqi dramas, were influenced by the eight-legged essay. However, such structural features can be found in various classical Chinese literary genres, indicating that these observations are one-sided and lack scientific grounding. Since the eight-legged essay originates from the exegesis of Confucian classics, the Principal Investigator of this project believes that the structure of the genre is not solely inherited from the “acquired structure” of other literary genres but also constrained by the “innate structure” tailored for “speaking on behalf of the sages.” Considering the historical and cultural context of the late Ming Dynasty, this project selects masterpieces of chuanqi drama composed by twenty representative playwrights of the time as examples. It examines the “innate structure” and “acquired structure” of the eight-legged essay as double filters, aiming to explore whether the intervention of the structure of the eight-legged essay breaks the inherent limitations of the chuanqi drama’s construction. In addition, it seeks to re-examine the cultural significance of the intervention of the eight-legged essay in the development of the chuanqi drama’s structure.

This project aims to write a monograph from a micro-perspective, focusing on Wang Qishu (1728-1799), to study the relationship between literature and various cultural aspects during the Qianlong period, as well as the psychological state of literati during that time. We will discover that material culture, economic conditions, and social status influence the reception, creation, and value of literature, and also contribute to the negotiation and conflict between tradition and modernity (during the Qianlong era). Wang was active during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty. He was a salt merchant, collector, poet, and official who enjoyed traveling, making friends, and compiling books. His lifelong activities were intertwined with the cultural circles of that time, granting him a unique socio-economic status. However, he could not become a prominent figure within the cultural sphere. When the Siku Quanshu Library was established, he was one of the most generous book donors, second only to Bao Tingbo, and received rewards from the emperor. He was also renowned for his passion for seal collecting, and his compilation Feihong Tang Seal Catalog is one of the most important seal catalogs of the Qing Dynasty. However, his achievements in poetry and literature were rarely discussed, and his works were not widely circulated. Donating money to obtain official position prevented him from being on par with the scholarly class who passed examinations. Qing records often sarcastically portrayed his antiquarian tendencies. Even in modern compilations of Qing poetry history and anthologies, he is seldom mentioned. In summary, Wang Qishu was a figure caught in a cultural dilemma. Through his traces, social interactions, and literary activities, we can observe the literature and culture of the prosperous Qianlong era from a different perspective.

J. M. Synge (1871-1909) was a critically acclaimed man of letters in twentieth-century Irish literature and is most remembered for his plays, such as The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and Riders to the Sea (1904). This year is the 150th anniversary of the dramatist’s work, which has been said to “demonstrate the importance of wildness, resistance and imagination” while simultaneously attracting controversy due to his unconventional depiction of nationhood and women. Compared to other Celtic Revivalists such as William Butler Yeats, Synge and his plays are not well known in the Greater China Area despite his fame in Europe and America. However, the fact that nine translators in China and Taiwan have translated Synge’s plays into Chinese since the 1920s is evidence of a degree of popularity. Though impressive, these translations have not been thoroughly vetted, researched, and critiqued. In this project, I seek to meticulously investigate those Chinese interpretations of Synge’s plays by all nine writers and scholars from China and Taiwan: Guo Moruo (郭沫若), Xu Xuxuan (徐序瑄), Tian Han (田漢), Peng Ching-hsi (彭鏡禧), Ma Ching-chao (馬清照), Chen Ge (陳戈), Tsai Chin-sung (蔡進松), Chang Tsung-chi (張崇旂), and Hsieh Chih-hsien (謝志賢). To further understand the Sinophonic adoption of Synge’s work, my project studies two dramatic performances of his The Playboy of the Western World. The first of which was staged in Beijing in 2006 and second in Taipei in 2016. My plan is to pursue a diachronic, chronologically ordered, study of the translation and staging of Synge’s plays in the Greater China Area, with a view to addressing a number of critical issues at the time they were transposed for a Chinese-speaking world: the nature and pattern of intercultural translation, the mutuality of western impact and Chinese agency, the problem of the domestication and exoticization of the ancestral literary artifact, the manipulating intervention of ideological imperatives, and the linguistic question of translatability. To draw a complete and holistic picture of how Synge’s work was received and understood, in addition to analyzing the nine Chinese translations and parsing the two performances, my study will canvass and examine a host of other materials, which will include academic articles and theses as well as newspaper and magazine articles. Vertically, my research contributes to a deeper understanding of the translation, reception, and impact of Synge’s plays in the Greater China Area. Horizontally, my work sheds light on the meanings and implications of the translations of his work as an integral part of the modern Chinese project of cultural engagement with the West. 

No consensus has been achieved on when literary modernism began in Hong Kong. Some critics trace the beginning of Hong Kong modernism to the 1950s, while others argue that its roots lie further back. While it is difficult to determine beginning of Hong Kong modernism with precision, it is an indisputable fact that the publication of Wenyi Xinchao [Literary New Wave] in the 1950s by Ma Lang (a.k.a. Ma Boliang), who served as a poet-cum-editor of the magazine, was crucial for the later development of Hong Kong modernism. The relationship between the magazine and modernism has been the focal point for much discussion since then. However, to what extent did the magazine devote to promoting modernism is controversial. For example, while Ma Lang claimed that the magazine was meant to advocate modernism in Hong Kong in the 1950s, a major and regular contributor to the magazine, Lee Wai-Ling, thought otherwise. In the seventh issue of the magazine, Lee remarks that whether the much-used term “modernism” should be considered a catch-all term is still a question that has yet to be answered. Despite the fact that no consensus has been reached about the relationship between the magazine and modernism, it is a common belief that the magazine has had a potent influence on the later development of Hong Kong modernism. Therefore, rather than following along with the current discussion, this proposed project will focus on the following question: What are the elements of modernism to be found in the magazine? Among previous studies it should be noted that only a few have actually investigated the characteristics of modernism. In addition, the recent development of Western modernist discourse has not been taken into account. This project aims to bridge this research gap by examining all fifteen issues of the magazine. Two distinctive features of Hong Kong modernism observed in the magazine will be discussed in detail. This study argues that the transformative political stance of the magazine, from nationalism to localism over the years, and its localized Chinese lyrical tradition are in fact a progressive and future-oriented force in the development of Hong Kong modernism. Upon reconsidering the characteristics of modernism found in the magazine, this project will help conceptualize the distinctive features of early Hong Kong modernism.

Representation is a key concept to cultural studies. Who can be on TV? Do they represent diversity or stereotypes? Why? What will be the consequences? These are questions of aesthetics and politics. This study aims to write a critical history of representation of Chinese mainlanders in Hong Kong TV dramas (HDs, hereafter). From the lazy and imprisoned Ah Chian（阿燦, 《網中人》1979）, to the well-educated and conniving Tian Mi (田蜜, 《不懂撒嬌的女人》2017), mainlander images have become more and more complicated, contingent, and contradictory. This representation has a symbolic power that has contributed to the public imaginations and to practices of Mainland-Hong Kong relations, as well as the Hong Kong identity. Ma (1999) and Gunn (2006) have found a dualism in several pre-1997 HDs: barbarian/civilized, other/us, mainlander/HongKonger, which contributes to constructing a Hong Kong identity. They are illuminating because this dualism continues to appear in post-1997 HDs; but they have not criticized the dark side of it: discrimination and symbolic violence. 

The refugee crisis of the 21st century is one of the most challenging the globe has faced; today more than an estimated 68 million people are displaced from their homes. Postcolonial and diaspora studies have been slow to respond to the need to reconceptualize theories of migration in the context of the new age of migration. The traditional articulations of diasporic identity formation are lacking in theorizing refugee identities characterized by statelessness, violence and precarity. The kinds of transnational affiliations that foster diasporic identity formations are often absent in the case of refugees on the move as are the engendering of hybrid and cosmopolitan identities so celebrated in diaspora studies

Given the escalating effects of climate change, intense urbanisation and population growth, there is a rising concern about sustainable food provisioning. Amidst overlapping uncertainties and challenges, high-technological, vertical and controlled farming in the urban area is increasingly positioned as a future-proof, and local food source untethered by the climate. High-technological farming often includes hydroponic or aquaponic practices, the use of LED light as sunlight, enclosed controlled growing environment and various automation measures. While these farming methods start to receive attention as a possible mode of climate adaptation, research surrounding the area in Hong Kong and around the world is still limited by an agrotechnological perspective. Framed in an interdisciplinary Environmental Humanities, this project brings the insights and approaches of the humanities into productive dialogue with agrotechnology and environmental science to examine this emerging and important farming landscape, with a specific focus on Hong Kong. Situating Care in Sustainable High-technological Urban Farming will deploy interwoven qualitative methods, specifically site visits, interviews, focus groups and comprehensive textual analysis. Grounded in rich empirical materials, the project will draw on and refigure the concepts of critical care, future, and more-than-human to develop an innovative conceptual approach through a care-based approach—care ecology—to account for, assess, and intervene in the contested narratives and practices of care and future in the making of urban farming. The central questions that guide this project include: What are the issues and limitations of the current narratives of care and technocratic mode of futuring that are mobilised in some urban farming practices? What are the multifaceted futures and relations enacted through, or impeded by the current and emerging technological, controlled urban farming practices, and their multispecies consequences? How might approaching urban farming through a critical lens of care along with the additional temporal and more-than-human dimensions open up spaces for more sustainable technological mode of agri-food production? The findings of the project will offer a critical social and cultural understanding of the subject that promises to enhance Hong Kong’s readiness for a wider seeding of urban farming practices and provide a solid basis for building towards sustainable food future. More broadly, the empirical and conceptual development will advance understandings in entangled human-environment-technology relations, serving as a test case for urban technological innovations in the time of climate crisis.

“Wig: The Global History of a Cold War Commodity, 1958-1979,” examines Asia’s “miraculous” economic growth under the US Cold War umbrella by tracing the “life” of a strange commodity: the human-hair and synthetic-fiber wig. In the 1960s-70s, wigs became a key Cold War commodity in Asia: the #2 export in South Korea, employing over 40,000 people; the #4 export in Hong Kong, employing 30,000; and a state-supported industry in India and Singapore. By the 1970s, when 40% of US women wore wigs or hairpieces, the wig was a US$1 billion global industry, dominated by Asian wigmakers and Korean-American wig retailers. But while no one intended for wigs to fuel Asian industrialization and globalization, the rise of wigs was not an accident. The wig became a Cold War commodity in 1965, when the US extended its 1950 trade embargo against China to include communist “Asiatic” hair – cutting off China’s US$10 million hair trade to punish its escalation of the Vietnam War. This seemingly minor intervention had major consequences: by restricting trade in communist hair, the embargo devastated Hong Kong’s wig industry (which relied on Chinese hair) and jumpstarted South Korea’s industry (since the ROK harvested its own “anti-communist” hair). And as Asian wigmakers scrambled to find new, ideologically acceptable hair sources, they produced a complex map of the Cold War Asia-Pacific: hair was smuggled from China to Hong Kong through Indonesia, and flown from non-aligned India to US-allied South Korea. Wigs thus reveal how Asian export-led industrialization took shape under and beyond US Cold War influence. This project introduces global and interdisciplinary approaches to studying Cold War history. By examining how wigs moved, we understand Asian growth differently: seeing how Asia’s industrialization was shaped not only by Cold War politico-economics but also by ordinary people, from bureaucrats and factory workers to hair peddlers and wig-wearers. The project thus makes a methodological intervention in two growing fields of history, the history of capitalism and global history, by combining “top down” (diplomatic history, political history, economic history) and “bottom up” (social history, labor history, material culture) approaches, producing a thick, transnational approach to global history. “Wig” will yield a book proposal, conference presentations, a journal article, and a complete book draft. To create impact beyond academia, project findings will be used to produce multilingual global history teaching materials, which will be disseminated locally and through a web site for educators around the world.

Redressing Atrocities: Forms of Reconciliation in Postcolonial Southeast Asian Literature This project offers a critical exposition of reconciliation in postcolonial Southeast Asian literature in English. It considers how literary forms are used as a medium to explore reparative possibilities for past and present conflicts in Southeast Asia. How might we read Anglophone Southeast Asian literature and critically frame the apparent lure of reconciliation for postcolonial Southeast Asia? How do these texts register reparative desires in their literary strategies, narrative shapes, and formal structures? What aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological roles do literary imaginations perform in present-day conflict-ridden spaces around the world? Though reconciliation assumes a prominent status in public discourses and transitional justice mechanisms such as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions globally, it has yet to attain sustained discussion in the literary humanities. This is particularly so in postcolonial critical discourses which have often stressed the ethical value of resistance and viewed reconciliation with suspicion. While some postcolonial scholars have begun to examine the complexity of reconciliation in recent years, they have hitherto tended to overlook the remedial potential of English-language Southeast Asian narratives. As a first attempt to address these critical lacunae, this proposed ECS project seeks to reclaim the vocabulary of reconciliation for postcolonial studies and shift the field’s geographical ambit from the dominant sites of Canada, South Africa, Australia to the often neglected Southeast Asia. In particular, the project examines a corpus of Anglophone Southeast Asian literature on four conflicts: Tan Twan Eng’s novel on the Japanese occupation of Malaya, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection on the war in Vietnam, Vaddey Ratner’s literary memoir on the Cambodian genocide, and the recent poetry on the Rohingya crisis. This proposed project argues that by addressing atrocities and their aftermaths, the selected postcolonial Southeast Asian texts thematically and formally register an ethics of reconciliation. Such literary expressions seek to redress injustices and repair injured communities within and beyond Southeast Asia, despite the acknowledged enormity, if not impossibility, of the task. Contrary to its often reductive representation in governmental policies and legal avenues, reconciliation as articulated in the selected aesthetic forms captures the paradoxes, partiality, and cultural-historical embeddedness of reparative work. All four cases consider the possibility of reconciliation and the countervailing prospect of irreconcilability. Overall, this project demonstrates that Anglophone Southeast Asian literature makes an important contribution to rethinking reconciliation outside bureaucratic and legal-judicial domains.