Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu

Field: Tibetan and Chinese Visual Culture
Advisor: Gray Tuttle and Ying Qian
Email: yl3452@columbia.edu

Yuyuan (Victoria) Liu is a PhD student on the History-East Asia track, focusing on Tibetan and Chinese visual culture. Her research interest covers Tibetan cultural productions including art (both traditional and contemporary), photography and film. Victoria has written on topics such as the representation of Tibetan people in portrait photography, the use of traditional religious vocabulary in contemporary art and the indexicality of photographic technology in Tibetan cinema.

Her current project focuses on Tibetan portraits under the influence of photographic technology. With training in comparative media, she approaches the act of portrait making, image forming and photo taking as visual, cultural and social practices and attempts to place them in a context that is closely correlated with the evolution of Chinese visual culture and social environment.

Before joining the doctoral program, Victoria received her BA in Art History from Barnard College and MA in Tibetan Studies from EALAC at Columbia University.