About me
My research in Chinese film and media has been supported by the Australian Research Council and the Taiwanese Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation. My work on Hong Kong Cinema (2003) was inspired by the idea of the city-state as a culture hub producing a special form of cinema in response to three powerful influences, exerted by the colonizers, mainland China and its own distinct, local culture. Shifting my next focus to the mainland, the book Chinese Documentaries (2007) reflects the transition from the Mao period to the opening of China to the West, with the promise of the development of a genuinely public sphere. At the core of this research is the identification of a special type of film, the dogmatic documentary. A third research interest has been the relation between the traditional Confucian notion of harmony via obedience (2012a) in sharp contrast with the Western ideal of harmony via consensus achieved by critique (2012b), a concept absent in the Chinese tradition. The fourth and most recent research focus has been a Peircean form of social semiotics, with applications to social media (2017), Chinese architecture (2018), and cartoons (2014; 2021; 2022). Currently, I am working on the evolution of the politics of cartooning in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.