Vivien Jiaqian Zhu

Navigating the unseen, the omitted, and the marginalized in visual research. How do the ephemeral, sensory traces of East Asian performance traditions survive their translation into digital data streams? THE VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHER'SDATA OTHER: SECRETS UNVEILED FOR A SOCIOLOGICAL J. M. COETZEE (Eliva Press, June 2026) 『視覚民族誌学者のデータ・アザー：社会学的J・M・クッツェーに向けて明かされる秘密』（Eliva Press、2026年6月刊行）introduces a rigorous methodological framework for documenting the interstitial spaces where the sensing body, material textiles, and digital platforms collide. Bridging the archival system with the post-colonial narrative of J. M. Coetzee, the monograph interrogates the hidden architectures of the "Data Other"—the unquantifiable human interiority that resists digital capture. By tracking how secrets, ethical boundaries, and sensory absences manifest both in field observation and on the literary page, this work establishes a radical sociological framework for reading text as live cultural data. It is a critical read for researchers working at the intersections of sociological theory, visual cultural studies, and transnational literature.

Abstract: In addition to sexual politics and interrelationship, the medieval vernacular fiction The Plum in the Golden Vase 金瓶梅 establishes a social web by focusing on the exchange of objects. Recalling a historical tradition of male actors cross dressing as female roles in Chinese theatrical performances, I will compare the minor character Shu-t‟ung with professional practitioners, and reflect upon Shut‟ung‟s embodied femininity within the diaclects of the real and the fictional. For Shu-t‟ung‟s gendered body, I will extend the notion of the object to the objecthood manifested in characters of the novel. In this regard, I read Shu-t‟ung as a human object that embodies the dynamics of circulation. How does Shu-t‟ung perform his objecthood from his gendered body? To approach this question, I will focus on one scene on cross-dressing in Chapter 35 of the novel, wherein Ying Po-chüeh asks Shu-t‟ung to dress up as a female lead to entertain guests with southern songs. Why does Ying Po-chüeh initiate this demand for Shu-t‟ung to dress up as a female lead to entertain him? How do female mains react to lending clothes to Shu- t‟ung? How do the lyrics of the song relate to Shu-t‟ung per se? The comparison between Shu-t‟ung and professionals leads me to reflect upon the degree of the authenticity of his femininity in a coerced performance, and the interrelation between his objecthood and gendered body. As gendered objects and gender constructs further formulate a figurative circulation of femininity, the novel has multi-layer objecthood manifested through Shu-t‟ung‟s body, his song lyrics, and his forced performance. I argue that Shu-t‟ung‟s body and his gender eventually serve as a sexually-neutral site for fabricated femininity and gestural performance of cross-dressing.

ABSTRACT: This paper presents a precise translation and critical analysis of Yūko Tsushima’s (津島佑子) “In Celebration of a Half-life”(“半減期を祝って hangenki wo iwatte”) (2016), examining the linguistic challenges in rendering the Japanese text into English. The study focuses on broader issues of genre, arguing that while translation studies often foreground poetry as a site of untranslatability, prose fiction presents its own complexities through narrative continuity, structural coherence, and thematic development. The author reflects on difficulties in interpreting abrupt narrative transitions, political allusions, and ethnographic terminology, especially in references to Japanese identity and race. Finally, the analysis situates Tsushima’s work within a global environmental and technological discourse, linking its concerns about nuclear disaster to broader historical and transnational contexts such as Chernobyl and large-scale infrastructural transformations. The translation thus becomes not only a linguistic exercise but also a critical act that reveals the text’s engagement with ecological anxiety, futurity, and the socio-political implications of modernity.

Abstracts:  This study implements a praxis of relational comparison to reconfigure our understanding of 18th-century Sinitic vernacular fiction. Rather than evaluating Cao Xueqin’s masterwork through the standard linear progression of the Eurocentric novel, this paper establishes a cross-cultural triangulation between Homeric epic fate and late imperial allegorical structures. Specifically, I argue that Qin Keqing operates as a macro-cosmic somatic catalyst whose physical desire and early death drive the structural decline of the Jia clan. Drawing on Zhuangzi’s non-dualist philosophy of wuhua (物化 - the transformation of things), the study demonstrates that Keqing’s hyper-aestheticized bedroom functions as an active ontological threshold—resembling the performative "Ghost Gateway" (Guimendao) found in early Chinese drama. This spatial configuration creates a system of concentric spectatorship that actively destabilizes the objective gaze of the reader, transforming the act of reading into an ongoing, tactile performance of psychological transformation.

At the beginning of Scene #2 of “Top Graduate Zhang Xie,” sheng is sent off through the Ghost Gateway (鬼门道) by a music troupe in the back stage to become Zhang Xie. The ritual of sending off (断送) transforms actors into characters, and the stage into a dreamscape. Performance on stage contains a ritualistic connotation that musicians summon ghosts, in the form of actors, from the other world to represent dreams in the past. Hence, theatrical performance is actually a dreamscape. Zhungzi’s dream elucidates that there is no absolute reality or illusion, awakening or dream, but always ongoing “transformations of things.” Following Zhuangzi’s non-dualism, dreamscape of theatrical performance focuses on the gesture of crossing a boundary and the unfolding of multiple subspaces of dreamscape such as dreadful realm and architectural space. Through the spatial logic of theatrical performance, crossing a boundary and entering endless layers of the dreamscape generate diverse emotional effects such as humor, dread and melancholy.

In 2020, The University of Hong Kong 香港大学 celebrated the centennial birth of its alumni Eileen Chang 張愛玲 アイリーン・チャン with materials from the HKU Archives. In 2022, a new translation of Eileen Chang’s 張愛玲 アイリーン・チャン story “Xiang Jian Huan” was discovered from the Ailing Zhang 張愛玲 アイリーン・チャン papers of USC Libraries’s Special Collection. Echoing recent discoveries in the Eileen Chang 張愛玲 アイリーン・チャン Studies, this project ponders upon the motif of politics and adventure fiction within the cultural landscape of Hong Kong. Re-assessing the role of war in historicity, this paper hopes to contribute to new understandings in Hong Kong Studies.

In 2020, The University of Hong Kong 香港大学 celebrated the centennial birth of its alumni Eileen Chang 張愛玲 アイリーン・チャン with materials from the HKU Archives. In 2022, a new translation of Eileen Chang’s 張愛玲 アイリーン・チャン story “Xiang Jian Huan” was discovered from the Ailing Zhang 張愛玲 アイリーン・チャン papers of USC Libraries’s Special Collection. Echoing recent discoveries in the Eileen Chang 張愛玲 アイリーン・チャン Studies, this project ponders upon the motif of politics and adventure fiction within the cultural landscape of Hong Kong. Re-assessing the role of war in historicity, this paper hopes to contribute to new understandings in Hong Kong Studies.

This latest volume, SINO-JAPANESE LITERATURE IN PERSPECTIVE: A Short Communication to the World Literature (Eliva Press, 2026) tested the geographical boundaries of literary encounters. It is formative for the pedagogical potential of William Shakespeare, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Virginia Woolf, Wang Shifu, and Li Yu. Drawing on comparative literary analysis and visual-cultural interpretation, this volume explores how classical traditions, modern transformations, and cross-cultural dialogues have shaped the formation of Sino-Japanese literary discourse. This work will be of interest to scholars and students of Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, Cultural History, and Transnational Literary Theory.

This manuscript was written as the final paper for Professor Andrew Jones's graduate seminar EA 204 – Jones 2019 Fall EALANG 204 001 Topics in East Asian Studies. This course provides a place for graduate-level seminars in East Asian Studies that rely primarily on secondary scholarship and texts in translation. Contents will vary between semesters but will typically focus on a particular theme. Themes will be chosen according to faculty and student interests, with an eye toward introducing students to the breadth of available western scholarship on that subject, from classics in the field to the latest publications

Directed by Emile de Antonio, the 1968 American documentary film In the Year of the Pig employs various historical footage and many interviews to show American involvement in the Vietnam War. Besides sequences of interviews and news footage, the opening and ending of the film also shoot sequences of the natural landscape of the river and mountain in Vietnam. With intentional montages of the natural landscape in the documentation of war, In the Year of the Pig establishes a contrast between the beauty of nature and a keynote of fierce fighting, heavy injury and political speeches. Sequences of natural landscape thereby offers a soothing visual experience and evokes a sense of what the nature might be in Vietnam before the war. Camera movement transforms natural landscape in Vietnam into a cinematic landscape, a dynamic medium where visual elements of river, mountain and land are further reproduced and remodeled in other sequences such as American intrusion and refugees’ escape. In addition to capturing the landscape, moving camera also mimics moving weapon to impose a colonial and military perspective on the aesthetic looking and shows a military predation and destruction of Vietnam’s territory through intentional montage and superimposition of voice-overs on the visual landscape. The militarized relation between the camera eye and cinematic landscape further problematizes the relation between viewership and perception beauty in a colonial and wartime narration.

In The Waves, Bernard always leads the discussion and tells the story of all six friends. Neville, not fully persuaded by Bernard’s narration, often follows Bernard’s remarks with a slight mockery of Bernard’s narration: “Let Bernard begin. Let him burble on, telling us stories. Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence” (Woolf 36). The tension between Bernard and Neville emerges from each of their firm belief in contrasting ways of narration: Bernard mainly dedicates his narration to depicting the universality of human nature with his “sympathetic understanding” (51), while Neville focuses on his need for individual emotional exclusiveness as expressed through his attention to Bernard and Percival. Woolf’s multi-perspectival technique, however, allows the reader to see Bernard from Neville’s point of view and Neville from Bernard’s.

Michelle H. Wang’s The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China argues that ditu—“terrestrial diagram”—goes beyond representation to make or re-make the “space and expectations about their functions within the cultures of preimperial and early imperial China.”Following Wang’s discussion of terrestrial diagram, this paper looks at two bronze vessels with decorative texts that were discovered in the middle chamber of Liu Sheng—King Jing of Zhongshan in 1968 at Mancheng, Hebei. Drawing on the philosophy of Zhuangzi’s dream paradox in “The Sorting Which Evens Things Out,” I will explain how the on-going process of “transformation of things” (wuhua物化) manifests in Liu Sheng’s hu vessels in such aspects as the double delineations of characters, the double states of the vessel as an object and as a personified entity, as well as the problem of the act of reading the inscriptions-- bird-scripts 鸟篆. In this paper, I will argue that the multi-layer transformative qualities embodied in the bird-scripts of Liu Sheng’s hu vessel suggest endless movements and alterations in the afterlife, which highlights a mutual-referential and co-dependent relationship between the process of transformation and a ceaseless pursuit for longevity and immortality in the Han dynasty.

ABSTRACT What is art? What is history? What is knowledge? What is scholarship? Following the discussion between art and craft, I reflect on the use of textile with scholarship from Julia Bryan-Wilson and Winnie Wong. Inspired by Susan Foster’s article “Choreography Empathy,” and Georgina Kleege’s More Than Meets the Eye, I associate space with choreography and kinesthetic movement – particularly the concept of “ma 間” for the 1960s-1980s Japanese fashion designers. 摘要 摘要 : 艺术是什么? 历史是什么? 知识是什么? 学术是什么? 继艺术与工艺之间的讨论之后, 我反思了朱莉娅·布莱恩-威尔逊和温妮·黄的学术研究中对纺织品的运用。受苏珊·福斯特的文章《编舞共情》和乔治娜·克利格的《不止于所见》的启发, 我将空间与编舞和运动学运动联系起来, 特别在1960年代至1980年代日本时装设计师的“间”概念之中。

Contemporary Japanese poet Yoshimasu Gōzō uses a 
"distorted mimesis" when performing his poetry. I examine the “in-betweenness” of Yoshimasu Gōzō’s voice in his live performance of a poetic radio play at the 48th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam in 2017, in collaboration with Dutch sound artists Lukas Simonis, Hank Bakker, and Oscar Jan Hoogland). How do media-especially radio and cassettes recordings—shape the materiality and ephemerality of Yoshimasu’s voice? Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), I consider human breathing as a sixth sense which enacts a poetic effect when a word is vocalized. In Japanese, this “in- betweennes” is denoted by the word “ma,” literally an “interval” between two things—both spatially and temporally. Here I take this “interval” to be what is between the human voice and the electric sound produced by radio and and other machines. I contend that the sonorous body of poet/vocalist/performer mobilizes all senses in the acoustic space of the performance and “corporealizes” sound into a haptic expression of the poetic spirit.

Abstract: In 494, Emperor Xiaowen, the de facto head, moved the Northern Wei (北魏 385–535) capital from Pingcheng (“平城”, in modern Datong, Shanxi) to Luoyang. One year after this event, the Guyang cave discovered the earliest dated inscriptions in the late Northern Wei. Antiquities in the Guyang cave embodies the influence of Emperor Xiaowen’s reform in the court with the emergence of a new garment—more sinicized—on the Buddhist sculptures. By examining the “Image of the Duke of Shiping” in the Guyang cave, this paper argues that the calligraphic style of “Wei Bei 魏碑” constitutes a new style in transition from Han official script to Tang regular script, and challenges predominating model-letter tradition (tiepai “帖派”) and Confucius thought.

In the wake of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, artists attempt to explore ways to present the motif of “3/11” beyond geographic confinement—beyond Japan. Given restricted access to the nuclear zone, how do artists respond to “3/11” without direct physical proximity to Fukushima? How do overseas Japanese artists represent what took place back in their homeland? How do people outside Japan gain the access to experience and respond to “3/11”? To grapple with this representational dilemma of “here and there,” this paper looks at the performance art of the contemporary Japanese artist Ei Arakawa—Does This Soup Taste Ambivalent? (2014). In this conceptual project, he attempted to mediate a geographic gap between New York (where he works) and Fukushima (where he comes from). He also intended to reach a geographical balance between Fukushima and the international audience by bringing his family to Frieze London. In dialogue with Does This Soup Taste Ambivalent?, this paper brings comparative examples of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s installation Untitled (Free/Still) (2007) and the socially engaged art piece Conflict Kitchen (2010). This paper attempts to extend the metaphor of a geographic boundary to invisible yet crucial boundaries among people, and to further spatialize what Nicolas Bourriaud regards as relational aesthetics. Visual representations of “here and there” can thus be thematically translated into a rendering of boundaries between artists and spectators/participants, between social environment and human beings and between different ethnic groups. Moreover, this paper examines the instrumental role of food in performance art. With the same incorporation of food, these works take advantage of the taste to unite people from different backgrounds, and to provide a corporeal medium to raise concerns for nuclear radiation and safety. The remediation of food, in art practice and social media, further produces a micro-social and micro-political narrative to think of food safety, human safety, and community conflicts.

As The Mad Drummer (狂鼓史) demonstrates a close correlation between performance and spectatorship, it appears baffling that the storyteller Liu Jingting claims that he does not need an audience in Kong Shangren’s (孔尚任) The Peach Blossom Fan (桃花扇). In order to answer the question, this paper interprets The Peach Blossom Fan (桃花扇) as a dynamic realm with geographic and metaphorical places rather than a static literary text. Master of Ceremonies’ multiple identities extend the notion of metaphorical displacement to an ongoing movement of shifting in and out the role inside performances. His repeated passages in and out the acting role and the performative realm signal a linear and cyclical dynamism. In terms of genre, a comparison between Ma Zhiyuan’s (馬致遠) deliverance play “Yueh-yang Tower” (呂洞賓三醉岳陽樓) and the historical play The Peach Blossom Fan (桃花扇) further analyzes distinctive dynamisms in dreamscape and in theatricality. Moreover, an examination of Zhang Dai’s (張岱) “Mid-September on West Lake (西湖七月半) ” points out a concentric spectatorship and a paradox of spectatorship. Spectator’s simultaneous states of being the subject and the object of gazing result in endless circles of watching and a concentric spectatorship with hierarchies. The paradox of spectatorship echoes the dynamism of The Peach Blossom Fan (桃花扇) with notions of liminality and ongoing movement, but restricts the dynamism due to endless layers of concentric spectatorship. Thus, we can answer the question by stating that although Liu Jingting (柳敬亭) desires to escape audience’s gaze and has the ability to temporarily step out of theatricality, it is still impossible for him to completely escape the audience due to the paradox of spectatorship.

The Japanese concept of "ma間" intrigues fashion designers' imagination of the space between textile and skin. Exploring Art, Knowledge and Movement in Japanese Fashion tells a philosophical story of the Greek poiein, avant-garde Japanese fashion designers, the Paris high fashion scene, and Chinese classics from early modern to contemporary times. It traverses the terrain of history of art, performance studies, religion, and the eighteenth-century literary masterpiece The Dream of Red Chamber (Hongloumeng 紅樓夢, Story of the Stone 石頭記).

This essay offers a critical reading of J. M. Coetzee’s 库切 novelistic legacy from both Disgrace (o.p. 1999) and Elizabeth Costello (o.p. 2003). It explores the problematic issues with representations of animals and its inter-“connection” between literature and the larger physical world (Mohamad Ali Hassan Alakhdar, 2019; Alakhdar, 2012; Alakhdar, 2019). On the other hand, it mitigates the public narrative web of social others within anthropocentric and biocentric perspectives (Wagner 2017; Miller 米勒 1988; Watt 1957; Hale 多萝西・J. 黑尔 1989; Hale 多萝西・J. 黑尔 1998; Johnson 2002; Mahfouz-Brown 張仲思 March 5, 2015; Caillois 1942; Zhu 2024; Zola 1960-1967; Lukács 1950; Lukács 1920).

Abstract:As a well-known critic in the seventeenth-century China, Jin Shengtan distinguishes himself through his innovative reading strategies as well as on strong attack on previous hermeneutics practices. This paper compares the same openings of the Act 5 of Book II in the 1498 Hongzhi edition of Wang Shifu‟s Xixiang ji (The Story of the Western Wing) and Jin Shengtan‟s edition, examining the textual changes Jin made therein and the limitation of his commentary. Moreover, this paper associates Jin Shengtan‟s annotated commentary with Grandma Jia‟s commentary of the same scene in Chapter 54 of The Story of the Stone. 摘要：金聖歎是十七世紀中國著名的批評家，他以其創新的解讀策略以及對以往詮釋學實踐的有力批判 而著稱。本文通過比較了 1498 年弘治版王實甫《西廂記》第二回第五折與金聖嘆本批《西廂記》本的 的相同開篇，探討了金聖嘆對文本的改動、刪補修正及其註釋的局限性。此外，本文也將金聖嘆的註釋 與賈母對《紅樓夢》第五十四回同一場景的註釋連結起來。