China Seminar

3:00 p.m., Tue, 2/23

Yomi Braester: “The City as Found Footage: The Reassemblage of Chinese Urban Space.” In Moore Hall 155A.

The urban environment of the twenty-first century is to a large extent defined by two forms of the moving image: surveillance videos and found footage. Built environment becomes a visual ecosystem that produces, trashes, and recycles images. The city, in turn, functions both as a watching eye and as a visual objet trouvé. Braester examines the contemporary urban ecology of the image in the People’s Republic of China through cases that lie on the borderline between surveillance video and found footage, including self-made videos and selfies, documentation of accidents and murder, and video art by Tan Tan, Li Juchuan, and Ai Weiwei.

Yomi Braester is Byron and Alice Lockwood Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media at the University of Washington in Seattle. He holds degrees from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Yale University. He has published extensively on modern Chinese literature, film, and visual culture. His current project, Cinephilia Besieged: Viewing Communities and the Ethics of the Image in the People’s Republic of China, is supported by a Guggenheim fellowship.

Event Sponsor
Center for Chinese Studies and Confucius Institute at UHM, Mānoa Campus

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