June 29, 2018
7PM
Kane Hall, Room 210
University of Washington
Professor Yomi Braester, Ellen Y. Chang, and Belinda Qian He
Yomi Braester is professor of comparative literature and cinema studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has published extensively on modern Chinese literature, film, and visual culture, as well as on architecture, the politics of memory, and Israeli cinema. Among his publications are the books Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (2003) and Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract (2010), which received the Levenson book prize in 2012. His current book projects include “Cinephilia Besieged: Cinematic Experience and Public Discourse in the People’s Republic of China” and ”Screen City: Chinese New Media and Beijing’s Politics of Emergence.” Braester received his PhD from Yale University. In 2013, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.
Ellen Y. Chang is a curator, filmmaker, and PhD scholar in video art/installation and cinema at the University of Washington. In her academic research, she has been exploring the transactional encounter between contemporary Taiwanese video art/installation, cinema, and popular culture as a process of aesthetic decolonization. Her recent work on sound and audio walks sees this relationship as borne out of the island’s complex historical relationship with China. As a simultaneous theorist and a practitioner, Ellen is moving towards more engaged, sensitive and practical understandings of how multimedia art reflects the (re-)occurring themes of everyday politics across international geographies. Ellen is currently interning with the curatorial department of the Seattle Art Museum for the Asian Art Museum’s reopening exhibition in 2019.
(Belinda) Qian He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media at the University of Washington. She is generally interested in historical and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of East Asian cinema, visual criminology, art, and display culture, associated with atrocity, violence, and witnessing. She has published on film theory, animation, teen film, politics of childhood/memory, the Cold War aesthetics, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Now she is conducting a research project on image and justice across multiple Chinese-speaking worlds, funded by Asia Art Archive and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. She also works as a contributing writer, film critic, curatorial and reviewing committee member for independent film festival and film criticism competitions.