The Affective Embodiment: Camera Eyes on the Biopolitics of COVID-19 in China

On 22 May 2023, the Centre’s Post-Doctoral Fellow Jinyan Zeng will host film screenings and discussions with scholar and curator Dr. Zimu Zhang. A collection of short films made by Chinese artists between 2020 and 2022 will be presented during the event. 

• Please register for the event here

About the Speaker

Zimu Zhang is currently a VisitANTS Research Fellow in Critical Studies of Biodiversity and the Anthropocene at University of Oulu, Finland. Her research focuses on visual culture, eco-cinema and ecofeminist arts. She completed her PhD research on Anthropocene (counter)visuality in contemporary Chinese visual culture with a focus on frontier geography in 2022 from School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. She is the recipient of the 2022 Landhaus fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU.

Zhang is an active filmmaker, curator and socially engaged art practitioner. For more information,  please visit: https://zimu-z.com/

Reference reading:

Mejón, Ana, and Sagrario Beceiro. 2022. ‘Films Made During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Isolation Through the Gaze of Filmmaking Students’. Art Education 75 (6): 41–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2022.2103360.

Richards, Stuart, and Jessica Pacella. 2023. ‘“We Need to Keep Making Stuff, Regardless of What the Situation Is”: Creativity and the Film Festival Sector during COVID-19’. Arts and the Market 13 (1): 20–32. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAM-11-2021-0061.

Sorace, Christian. 2021. ‘The Chinese Communist Party’s Nervous System: Affective Governance from Mao to Xi’. The China Quarterly 248 (S1): 29–51. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741021000680.

Zhang, Chenchen. 2022. ‘Contested Disaster Nationalism in the Digital Age: Emotional Registers and Geopolitical Imaginaries in COVID-19 Narratives on Chinese Social Media’. Review of International Studies 48 (2): 219–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000018.

Zhang, Jinman. 2022. ‘Feminist Responses to COVID-19 in China through the Lens of Affect’. Feminist Media Studies, March, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2022.2041694.