Huanjing: Set Design, Eventful Documentary, and the Ecologies of Chinese Media Studies – A Conversation with Weihong Bao and Ying Qian

This workshop session focuses on the relationship between media and the environment(al) (huanjing 環境) in the Chinese context, with a discussion on the recent special issue of Critical Inquiry, coedited by Weihong Bao, Jacob Gaboury, and Daniel Morgan entitled “Medium/Environment” (volume 49, number 3, Spring 2023), together with the forthcoming monograph by Ying Qian entitled Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Cinema in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia University Press, 2023). Weihong Bao and Ying Qian will discuss their works as they are related to Chinese media studies and the conceptual nexus of medium/environment.

Readings to be discussed include:

(1) Weihong Bao, Jacob Gaboury, and Daniel Morgan. “Introduction: Medium/Environment.” Critical Inquiry, volume 49, number 3, Spring 2023, 301-314.

(2) Weihong Bao. “Set Design Thinking and the Art of the Human.” Critical Inquiry, volume 49, number 3, Spring 2023, 428-461.

(3) Ying Qian. “Introduction.” In Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China. New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming, 2023.

This event is part of the optional module for Ying Qian’s “Chinese Media Cultures” graduate seminar (spring 2023). Participants outside the seminar are welcome to register and join.

To attend and receive the readings, please RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/huanjing-a-conversation-with-weihong-bao-and-ying-qian-tickets-624177019267.

Weihong Bao is an associate professor of film and media and East Asian languages and cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). She also coedited “Media/Climates,” a special issue of Representations (2022).

Ying Qian is an associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures at Columbia University and the author of Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth–Century China (Columbia UniversityPress, forthcoming 2023).