RESEARCH INTERESTS:

Technologies of the State, Art and Politics, Techno-aesthetics, Environmental Media, Infrastructure, Film and Media, Post/Coloniality, Nationalism, Trauma, East/South East Asia, Asian American and Pacific Islanders Identity Formation

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CURRENT RESEARCH

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Seeing the Spectral State:  Island Media, Symbolic Power and Creative Recognition in the Taiwan Strait

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Internationally unrecognized states gain visibility through their political vulnerability, such that the increasing threat of war in the Taiwan Strait in fact elevates Taiwan’s global visibility. The question of political recognition for Taiwan is thus inevitably tied to the aesthetics of conflict. As a result, lacking official channels of recognition, the operationalization of aesthetics become an essential strategy in a state project of seeking legitimacy and legibility.

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My research empirically examines the revitalization of archipelagic wastelands of the former war zone in the Taiwan Strait and their reincarnation into “international art islands” through the mobilization of contemporary art festivals and exhibitions. How do state-funded artists and cultural workers deployed to the “front lines” produce the symbolic capital that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, is necessary for state legitimation, and what kinds of resistances do they encounter? How can art production and exhibition revitalize and “disenchant” the psychological and environmental ruins haunted by ghosts and left behind by decades of war and abandonment? 

The ethnographic accounts from my investigation asserts that the aesthetic reimagination of a postwar archipelagic landscape goes hand in hand with a radical reassembling of new sets of symbols that aim to not only produce different forms of capital but also restructure relations of social recognition. 

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Other Research:

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Scales of Security: Engineering and Visuality in the New Cold War

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Scales of Security: Engineering and Visuality in the New Cold War, is a project which addresses the role of American and Taiwanese engineers in the chip manufacturing industry within an ocular transformation of human perception of that shifts between microscales of nanoparticles and macroscale geopolitics. By examining transnational engineers and fabrication plants set up in the United States for purported reasons of national security, I ask how material engineering in the technology industry in fact shape and are shaped by human cultural and cognitive understandings of concepts such as space, scale, and security.

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Archipelagic Art and the Global South: How Indonesian and Taiwanese Artists Navigate the Global Art World

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In 2022 Documenta Fifteen (d15), the world’s premier contemporary art exhibition held in Germany, celebrated artists from the Global South, and in a one exhibition hall, a large draping reproduction of Taiwan’s national flag was hung prominently by an Indonesian artist collective—a rare sight at an international event where Taiwan almost never has any political representation as a nation-state. While the Indonesian-curated show was ultimately mired in political and ideological scandals, Taiwanese artists became caught in between their relations with Indonesian partners in the Global South and their desires to be represented internationally.  This research focuses on ethnographic research conducted in Indonesia and Taiwan with artists and curators in collaboration with the Indonesian rural art collective Jatiwangi Art Factory in Majalengka, Indonesia. How do Taiwanese artists navigate both socio-cultural and political ambiguities in their turn to the Global South? Moreover, how does artists conceptually contest binary understandings of North-South relations? What types of challenges characterize nationalist aspirations from grounds-up transnational artistic collaborations, and what kinds of power dynamics remain latent within cultural differentials between non-Western partnerships?  By studying grassroot cases of Taiwanese-Indonesian relations and cultural exchange within a greater political ecology, this research sheds light on the complexities of coming to terms with the ambiguities of national and cosmopolitan identities.

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Where is Asian America?  Transnationality, Identity, and Misrecognition

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In The Loneliest Americans (2021), Jay Caspian Kang writes, "It's hard to blame anyone for not caring enough about Asian Americans because nobody -- most of all Asian Americans -- really believes that Asian America actually exists." Yet, Asian Americans do exist, as a line on the US census, as well as within the categorically constructed identity of immigrant families from such a large swathe of the world that the term is rendered almost meaningless. This research posits that the locus of the Asian American identity hinges not on a path of assimilation on American soil, but rather lies within interstices of transnational networks between Asia and the American continent.  The question of the Asian American identity is not Who? but Where?  This project follows mobile immigrants of Asian descent and investigates how the Asian American is invented in Asia -- as a concept that exists before they even arrive in America -- and how such an identity becomes challenged from within its own multiplicities.

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