Tenggeer Hao

Field: Chinese Literature and Cinema
Advisor: Ying Qian
Email: t.hao@columbia.edu

Tenggeer Hao is a Ph.D. student in modern Chinese literature and cinema. His academic interests include modern and contemporary China, critical theory, and Buddhisms. In a close reading of several Chinese films, his M.A. thesis theoretically examines the notion of “coming out of the closet” in terms of representation, togetherness, and ethics of liberation. This has further brought him to the current project of formulating a Buddhist film theory. It explores how some filmmakers theorize both about and through filmmaking, and how such theorizations would speak to Buddhist understandings of visuality, desire, emptiness, temporality, and compassion. Tenggeer is also a documentary filmmaker, interested in documenting the camera’s encounter with such social units as a family, a school, or a monastery in their geographical and sociopolitical environments. Tenggeer received his BA in Chinese Language and Literature from Beijing Normal University (2013), and an MA in East Asian Studies, Critical Asian Humanities Track from Duke University (2016).