KEYNOTE SPEAKER BIO
Paul B. Jaskot
Paul Jaskot received his PhD in Art History from Northwestern University. He teaches courses on architectural history, modern architecture and urban planning, and German art with a particular emphasis on National Socialist Germany. In addition to his teaching, Jaskot is also the Co-Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab (formerly, the Wired! Lab). His scholarly work focuses on the political history of Nazi art and architecture as well as its postwar cultural impact. He is the author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (2000), The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (2012), and The Tyranny of the Object: An Introduction to the Barbarism of Art History (forthcoming 2026). In addition, he was a founding member of the ongoing Holocaust Geography Collaborative exploring the use of GIS and other digital methods to analyze the spatial history of the Holocaust. He contributed co-authored essays to their volume, Geographies of the Holocaust (2014), the first book to address the analysis of Holocaust spaces with GIS. Currently, he is continuing his collaborative work in an NEH-funded analysis of the spaces of the Nazi ghettos of Occupied Europe as well as a solo-research project on the history of the construction industry in Germany, 1914-1945. From 2014-2016, Jaskot was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) and the 2020-2021 Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.). He was also the President of the College Art Association (2008-2010) and the President of the National Committee for the History of Art (2020-2024), the US affiliate to the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA).
KEYNOTE SPEECH ABSTRACT
Paul B. Jaskot
Art History from the Margins: Architecture at War in Nazi Occupied Europe
Art history has long recognized the symbiotic relationship between art and war. And yet, art historians remain mostly fascinated by the responses to war or in how art legitimates war. The process of the war itself—armaments production, troop movements, etc.—is not really an art historical subject except as context for more object-based studies. In this art history, war acts on artworks and buildings not with them. This talk argues that looking at the seemingly marginal architectural involvement in war can only be addressed if we look beyond the margins of what constitutes an art-historical question for war. It places an emphasis on the dynamic relationship between materials, labor, and construction as a way of addressing how architecture is integrated into the waging of war, looking particularly at World War II and the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. Instead of one building, in this case we will have to look at a broader palette of architectural production. Architects and engineers carried new technologies like the manipulation of cement into the Nazi period and their experimentation helped them adapt further with new uses in World War II. Following the trail of building and construction through this period will help us distill which cultural ideas and values influenced the systemic political economy of Europe under Nazi occupation and, indeed, became central to the most nefarious plans of the Holocaust itself.
FACULTY PRESENTERS ABSTRACTS
Travis Wilkerson
An Injury to One Becomes an Injury to All
“This presentation will explore the ongoing creation of a new work – An Injury to All. It is a film made on the margins – formally and economically – in defense of a history that has likewise been forced – systematically, deliberately – to the margins. An Injury to All is both the prequel to An Injury to One (2001) and its urgent postscript. It traces the life of I.W.W. Organizer Frank Little before his arrival and infamous murder in Butte, Montana. Following his peripatetic, restless journey from his childhood in Oklahoma to his astonishing rise as a visionary organizer criss-crossing the American West, struggling for immigrant rights, for militant labor, for free speech and always and forever against the social catastrophe of war—his is a singular and irreplaceable story of American resistance and the inspiring vision of a different kind of world. Most of all, it restores his incompatible life—rather than the horror of his eventual death—to the place it always deserved to be. A ferocious antidote to the present moment and conscious riposte to the 250th anniversary of the USA.”
Titas Chakraborty
Studying Art for Studying the History of Work
What can art tell us about work and workers? Writing the history of workers is often a challenge as very often they did not write their own history. Most often, their lives become legible to us through records that were created by their employers or state authorities who exercised immense power over them. In this scenario, it often becomes imperative for historians to first, look for sources that workers had created outside overt structures of power and second, look at multiple archives with different, if possible, antagonistic sources of power. In this talk I will demonstrate how a wide variety of visual art – terracotta temple plaques, pencil sketches, artistic inscriptions, portraits – allows for exercising the two mentioned methods for studying lives and struggles of workers in eighteenth century Eastern India.
Jesse Olsavsky
The Center Cannot Hold: Doing Intellectual History From the “Margins”
Very often what we view as central is actually marginal and vice versa. This brief talk will discuss some of the methods I use to uncover and assess the ways significant ideas in history are made, or unmade, from the “margins.” I will discuss these methods via my current research projects. The first concerns the German-American philosopher Ellen Gottschalk who established a not-so-successful philosophical institute modeled on the Frankfurt Institute in post-independence North India. The project shows just how marginal the all-important “Frankfurt School” was in many contexts. The second relates to the influence of runaway slave and writer Frederick Douglass in West Africa in the early 20th century, revealing how standard interpretations of this central figure in US history had West African origins.
Rui Hu
A Speculative Essay Film from Fluid Histories to Floating Futures
This talk is anchored in the worldbuilding of my work Star House above the Breaking Waves, a speculative essay film that treats artistic practice as a mode of historical and theoretical inquiry into climate adaptation. In the research process, two new forms of city architecture became the focal point of my interest: floating cities and urban rewilding. These two forms of city often emerge as plausible geoengineering project ideas in response to the climate crisis. In its worldbuilding, some coastal cities are researching and making decisions around more extreme versions of these two forms of city reformation. This setting, as science fiction or speculative fiction, serves as a generative backdrop for the work, stimulating and containing various concepts and narratives. Star House above the Breaking Waves is set in the future of a southern coastal city. It connects three historical narratives: the fire-and-water deity Zhurong, a Qing-dynasty pirate obsessed with reading, and a 20th-century Hong Kong real estate developer who invented off-plan mortgage, all of which planted the seeds for future events when various factions explore different approaches to floating lives on the ocean. The work examines how systems of power and resistance shape our past, present, and speculative future as we imagine alternative ways of inhabiting the planet. In this talk, I present several key ideas and findings that emerged from the research process and how it informed the conceptualization and writing of the work.
Stephanie Anderson
Going on Your Nerve: Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets
Ted Berrigan’s early 1960s New York milieu was one of proliferating making: typewriters banging poems out at parties; collaborations with scissors and tape; journals scribbled in individually and with friends; scrapbooks kept for absent lovers; mimeograph magazine pages smearing as the stencils reached their breaking points. Berrigan, then in his late twenties and new to New York, was ambitious, and what form of English-language poetry could be more aesthetic and canonical than the sonnet? He began drafting sonnets in 1961; the earliest ones are exercises in formal rigor, reading like forced imitations. But in addition to this “apprenticeship” Berrigan was also reading the poet Frank O’Hara, who quickly became his idol, as well as absorbing lessons about collaboration from his own work with the artist Joe Brainard. In this paper, I suggest ways in which minor and marginal textual practices, ones that value present-based ephemerality – like imitation and collaboration – are part of the poetic practice of “going on your nerve,” a phrase Berrigan borrows from O’Hara. The Sonnets became Berrigan’s “breakthrough” work, but what we also view these acts of nervy enthusiasm as necessarily minor?
Hwa Yeong Wang
Authorship at the Margins: Gang Jeongildang and Harriet Taylor Mill in Comparative Perspective
This paper examines two understudied women philosophers situated at the margins of their respective philosophical canons: Gang Jeongildang (1772–1832), a Joseon Dynasty Confucian thinker, and Harriet Taylor Mill (1807–1858), an English philosopher and women’s rights advocate. Gang and Taylor Mill both enjoyed and developed intellectual companionship with their male partners, who explicitly credited and praised their writings. However, these writings were often conjoined with their partners’ names, a form of erasure that pushed their authorship to the periphery of the historical record. This has led some to question their authorship and philosophical and intellectual independence. The issues of companionship and authorship will be re-examined from both historical and philosophical perspectives. First, I will review the historical contexts in which women had limited access to education, intellectual circles, and philosophical writing. Second, the companionship, the detailed ways of interaction between the two couples, will be examined. The intellectual, emotional, and moral partnership, as well as the influence of Gang and Taylor Mill on their partners, will be explored. Third, the paper will demonstrate how people around them and later generations evaluated the role and value of Gang and Taylor Mill and their respective partnerships. I will argue that the nature of women philosophers’ agency as philosophers and authors must be assessed differently, attending to how canonical marginalization itself shapes the layers of interpretation surrounding their intellectual contributions.
Andrew Wortham
Chaotic Desires —Tracing Gay Men’s Digital Scandals in Contemporary China
This paper examines how digital scandals translate the Chinese moral idiom luan (乱, “chaotic”) into a perceived “truth” about the nature of male sexuality, and how that truth constrains LGBTQ+ horizons by essentializing gay men as sexually promiscuous and straining alliances between queer and feminism voices. Focusing on three recent digital scandals—the MC Bathhouse, the Hongjie videos, and the Changsha woman—I discuss how scandal functions as a truth‑performance: viral exposures do not merely report events but confer moral verdicts, portraying male promiscuity as an existential social threat. These portrayals emphasize the biomedical, moral and nationalistic risks that unrestrained desire can have on the public, moving the visions of LGBTQ inclusion as made possible through the neoliberal disciplines of suzhi and towards a perceived need to surveil and discipline sexual desires in reaction to feelings of precarity, disorder and threat towards women. Meanwhile, little reflexivity exists on the ways that the attention-based economies of digital platforms commodify and amplify queer sexual desires while simultaneously revealing these sexual transgressions to heterosexual audiences to increase engagement through gender conflicts.
PARTICIPATING FACULTY BIOS
carlos rojas / Duke University
Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image. His research focuses on issues of gender and visuality, corporeality and infection, and nationalism and diaspora studies, particularly as they relate to the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the global Chinese diaspora. He works primarily in the early modern, modern, and contemporary periods. He is the author of three books: The Naked Gaze: Reflection on Chinese Modernity, The Great Wall: A Cultural History, and Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation.
He is the co-editor of five books: Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (with David Der-wei Wang), Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures (with Andrea Bachner), and Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China (with Ralph Litzinger). He is also the translator of five volumes of literary fiction, including Yu Hua’s Brothers (translated with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, and shortlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize), Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles, and Marrow (of which The Four Books shortlisted for both the 2016 Man Booker International Prize and the 2016 FT/Oppenheimer Emerging Voices Award), and Malaysian Chinese author Ng Kim Chew’s Slow Boat to China and Other Stories.
Selina Lai-Henderson / DKU
Selina Lai-Henderson is Associate Professor of American Literature and History at Duke Kunshan University, where she co-directs the Humanities Research Center. She is on the editorial board of the American Quarterly (flagship journal of the American Studies Association), and is currently a non-resident Fellow (following her spring 2025 residency) in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
Lai-Henderson has published widely in the field of transnational American Studies. Her monograph-in-progress, “You Are No Darker Than I Am”: Writers of Transnational Blackness in Twentieth-Century China, reveals both compelling and competing transracial visions across different historic moments in China and in Chinese translation. She is the author of Mark Twain in China (Stanford UP, 2015), and her work has appeared in The Yale Review, MELUS, and Journal of Transnational American Studies, as well as book chapters in Mark Twain in Context (2019) and Langston Hughes in Context (2022). Her essay, “You Are No Darker Than I Am: The Souls of Black Folk in Maoist China” (PMLA, Sep 2023), is the 2023 recipient of the 1921 Prize in American Literature in the tenured category.
Lai-Henderson served as Chair and co-Chair (with Perin Gurel at Notre Dame) of American Studies Association’s International Committee (2022-2024). She has also recently served on the judging panel for the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies)’s Open Access Book Prize in Literary Studies. She was previously a senior Associate Managing Editor for the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and is on the advisory board of Global Nineteenth Century Studies.
Zach Fredman / DKU
Zach Fredman is historian of U.S.-East Asian relations and modern China. He is the author of The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941-1949 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022) and co-editor of Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1937-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2024). His new book project examines the U.S. military’s rest and recreation (R&R) program in Asia, Hawaii, and Australia during the Vietnam War. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include courses in the Global China Studies and Humanities majors, the common core, historical methods, and the histories of U.S. foreign relations and rock music. Fredman has published articles, essays, and book chapters in numerous venues, including Diplomatic History, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Modern American History, The Journal of Modern Chinese History, The Washington Post, The China Daily, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2017, he received the Edward M. Coffman First Book Manuscript Prize from the Society for Military History and the Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is also a recipient of an Apereo Atlas Teaching Award for his work on the DKU core course China in the World.
Travis Wilkerson / DKU
A chance meeting in Havana with the legendary Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez changed the course of Travis Wilkerson’s life. His internationally recognized body of filmmaking crosses boundaries with documentary and fiction, performance, and activism. At the epicenter of his work is the ongoing search for meeting points of aesthetic eloquence and political engagement, produced with an absolute modesty of material resources, as self-sufficiently as possible. In 2015, Sight & Sound called Wilkerson “the political conscience of American cinema.” His films have screened at hundreds of festivals worldwide, including Berlin, Sundance, Toronto, and Locarno. He is the recipient of an UnDo Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, Rockefeller Grant, as well as grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2025, he was included in the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows. “An Injury to One ” (2002)– was named one of the best avant-garde films of the decade by Film Comment and a “political-cinema landmark” by the LA Times. The New Yorker called “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” (2018) one of the “Sixty-Two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking.”
Titas Chakraborty / DKU
Titas Chakraborty is a historian of labor, gender and migration specifically studying eighteenth century South Asia. Her major fields of training are South Asian history, Labor History and World History. At DKU I teach interdisciplinary courses on migration, inter-Asian connections, South Asia and World History. Her book, Empire of Labor: Hired Workers, Mobility and the Rise of the East India Company State in Bengal, 1650-1817 (University of California Press, 2025) draws on the archives of the English and Dutch East India companies, and middle Bengali literary sources to chronicle the transformations in the structure and culture of hired work through closely studying the experience of European sailors and soldiers, indigenous silk reelers and boatmen over the eighteenth century. It shows that the changing relationship between the English East India Company state and its workers from the late seventeenth until the early nineteenth century had set the premise for labor-employer relationship of the modern colonial British Indian state.
She has also written extensively on slavery, slave trade, and slave resistance in the making of family, class and gender in the East India Company settlements in the eighteenth century which have appeared in Slavery and Abolition, International Review of Social History, and the Journal of Social History, amongst other places. She has also co-edited a book, A Global History of Runaways (University of California Press, 2019)
She received my doctoral degree from the University of Pittsburgh and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2017-2018.
Jesse Olsavsky / DKU
He is a historian who focuses largely on the history of slavery, abolitionism, and their legacies. He teaches courses on American history, American political institutions and Pan-African thought. He was co-director of the Freedom Lab, an interdisciplinary faculty-student research center devoted to the study of un-freedom and liberation in the modern world. He is also co-director of the Gender Studies Initiative, which organizes academic lectures, conferences, discussions, as well as student research on the topics of Gender, Feminism, and Sexuality.
His First book is titled The Most Absolute Abolition’: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835-1861 (LSU Press 2022), which was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Book Prize.
He is currently working on my second book, tentatively titled “The Tradition of Frederick Douglass: Pan-Africanism and Self-Determination, 1817-1945.” The book is both a reinterpretation of Douglass’ relationships to Africa and the Caribbean, as well as a study of the ways numerous African and Caribbean writers, newspaper editors, political leaders, and ordinary people interpreted Douglass’ thought, making him an icon of early Pan-Africanism.
His current and past research has been funded by such institutions as the ACLS, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yale University, and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.
He has published essays on the contributions of enslaved and free women activists to abolitionism and feminism, on underground activism in the life of Frederick Douglass, on runaway slaves, on the antislavery roots of prison/police abolition, and on the influence of abolitionist political theory in the Pan-African, anti-colonial thought of W.E.B. Dubois.
Rui Hu / DKU
Rui Hu is an Assistant Professor in Computation and Design at Duke Kunshan University and an artist working with video, installation, and computer simulation. His practice engages with issues related to time and temporality from a multitude of perspectives, such as causation, prediction, choice, and language. He is the recipient of the Best Experimental Animation Award at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival and a Jury Special Mention at the 25FPS Festival Croatia. His work has been shown in exhibitions and screenings at art spaces, institutions, festivals, and conferences, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; IFVA at the Hong Kong Arts Centre; Times Museum, Guangzhou; Three Shadows, Xiamen; Objetifs, Singapore; Start Museum, Shanghai; Wuhan Biennale; Siggraph Asia; IJCAI; ISEA, among others. He received an MFA in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BFA in Film and Television with a minor in Computer Science from New York
Keping Wu / DKU
Her research focus is the intersection among religion, gender, urbanization, public good, ethnicity, and charisma. She is especially interested in how people cross religious, ethnic, rural-urban and other boundaries. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include ethnography of China, ethnicity and diversity, and urbanization and changing religious landscapes.
She is the editor (with Robert Weller) of “It Happens Among People: Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth” (Berghahn 2019) and the co-author (with Robert Weller, C. Julia Huang-Lemmon and Lizhu Fan 2019) of “Religion and Charity: The Social Life of Goodness in Chinese Societies” (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She has had papers published in leading academic journals including Current Anthropology, Modern China and Journal of Asian Studies. She has been a member of the American Anthropological Association and Association of Asian Studies since 2006.
Wu has a B.A. from Peking University and a Ph.D. from Boston University. Before joining Duke Kunshan, she taught at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Sun Yat-sen University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Stephanie Anderson/ DKU
Her research asks how poems circulate through time and space and travel among persons. She is especially interested in genre, material practices, and ephemerality in 20th century U.S.-based poetry, as explored through small press publishing. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include modern and contemporary literature, creative writing, and textual production/bookmaking.
She is the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently Bearings (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press 2024), as well as the editor of Women in Independent Publishing (University of New Mexico Press, 2024) and the co-editor of All This Thinking: The Correspondence of Bernadette Mayer & Clark Coolidge (University of New Mexico Press, 2022). Her scholarly articles, interviews, short stories, and poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Annulet, Chicago Review, Gulf Coast, Post45, Textual Practice, and Women’s Studies.
Anderson has B.A. in English and fundamentals: issues and texts from the University of Chicago, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. From 2016 to 2019, she held a post-doctoral fellowship through the Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows and taught at Tsinghua University.
Hwa Yeong Wang/ DKU
Her research focuses on East Asian and comparative philosophy, with particular emphasis on Confucian philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the intellectual history of women, gender, and ritual in Korea and China. She is especially interested in how normative structures shape women’s agency in Confucian traditions. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include Confucianism and feminism, Chinese history and philosophy, and cross-cultural philosophy.
She is a co-editor and co-translator of Korean Women Philosophers and the Ideal of a Female Sage: The Essential Writings of Im Yunjidang and Gang Jeongildang (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Readings in Korean Confucian Philosophy (Hackett Publishing, forthcoming 2026). Her newest article, “Gwon Geun’s Defence of Zhu Xi’s Supplementary Chapter: Methodology of Early Joseon Korean Neo-Confucianism,” appeared online in Asian Philosophy in 2025. Her book chapters on Im Yunjidang and Gang Jeongildang appear in Women Philosophers from Non-Western Traditions: The First Four Thousand Years (Springer, 2024).
Wang has a B.A. in Confucian Philosophy and an M.A. in Confucian Studies from Sungkyunkwan University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Binghamton University (State University of New York). Before joining Duke Kunshan University, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Georgetown University (2020–2022) and Emory University (2022–2023).
Andrew Thomas Wortham / DKU
His research focuses on the political organizing of LGBT groups in Yunnan, China as they cooperate with the local government to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include Sociology of Gender; Medical Anthropology; China Studies; and NGO Studies.
Wortham has notable publications in the journals of Medical Anthropology, Journal of Contemporary China and Asian Studies Review. He is currently working on his book, Queer Collusion: HIV Quotas and LGBT Politics in Yunnan, China. He is also the Secretary of the Association of Queer Anthropology.
Wortham has a B.A. in Asian Studies from the University of Texas Austin (2012) and an M.A. (2018) and Ph.D. (2021) in Applied Anthropology from Columbia University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at New York University Shanghai (2022-2024) and the University of Nottingham Ningbo (2021) and taught at Kunming University of Science and Technology (2021-2022). Before beginning his Ph.D., he was a fellow with Teach for China (2013-2015).
Caio Yurgel / DKU
His research focus is primarily in philosophy, psychoanalysis, creative writing, and comparative literature, with an emphasis on literatures written in Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is especially interested in comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to literary and cultural analysis.
He is the author of Landscape’s Revenge (DeGruyter, 2018) and A Estética do Espetáculo: Cinco Teses em Walter Benjamin (NEA, 2013), winner of the Mario Pedrosa Award for Essays on Contemporary Art and Culture, awarded by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. He has also published two award-winning novels, Samba Sem Mim (Saraiva/Benvirá, 2014) and As Noites de Hong Kong São Feitas de Neon (Gato Bravo, 2019). His recent publications include essays on Alejandra Pizarnik, Roberto Bolaño, Hilda Hilst, Clarice Lispector, Li Ziqi, as well as “Archive as Catastrophe” (Glocalism, 2021). He has a forthcoming translation of Yu Hua’s 在细雨中呼喊 from Chinese into Portuguese.
Yurgel holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule, Freie Universität Berlin, and conducted a joint postdoctoral research fellowship with the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Peking University.
Kolleen M. Guy / DKU
Kolleen M. Guy is Professor of History and Associate Dean of Academic Services at Duke Kunshan University. Her research explores the relationships among memory, displacement, heritage, and empathy, with particular attention to how art and cultural institutions mediate difficult histories. She is co-director of the Heritage Lab and co-curator of Feeling into Form: Art, Movement, and the Making of Empathy, an exhibition examining how experiences of migration, exile, violence, and cultural translation take artistic form.
Jung Choi / DKU
Jung Choi is Assistant Professor of Visual and Media Studies at Duke Kunshan University, as well as a cross-disciplinary theorist and curator whose work bridges contemporary art, digital culture, and emerging technologies. She holds an M.A. in Visual Culture Theory from New York University and a Ph.D. in Visual and Media Studies from Duke University, along with a graduate certificate in Information Science and Studies that provided a foundation in digital humanities research. Choi has worked at leading international media art institutions, including Art Center Nabi in Seoul and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, where she contributed to pioneering projects in media art and technology. Her work investigates the intersections of art, technology, and media culture, with a focus on how artistic interventions critically respond to and reimagine our evolving media landscape. At the intersection of theory, practice, and pedagogy, she continues to experiment with creative and critical methods that bring together digital humanities, media studies, and the arts to address urgent questions about technology, sustainability, and the future of collective life.
Vivian Xu / DKU
Vivian Xu is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Her work investigates issues at the intersection of biology, material ecology, technology, and cybernetics. Her creative practice is research-driven, process-based, and informed by practices between the arts and sciences that merge methods from the studio and the laboratory.
Xu’s work has been exhibited at various institutions in Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Australia. She has also been awarded research residencies at institutions such as SymbioticA in Perth, Australia and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. Her work has been featured in books such as Climates. Habitats. Environments and The Annual of Contemporary Art of China: 2021 Edition and international media such as Tagesspiegel, CLOT, Neural, Frieze, RADII, and Global China Television. In 2022, her work The Silkworm Project was selected for the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology Hua Awards Shortlist hosted by the Serpentine Gallery.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of Media and Art at Duke Kunshan University in China. She is also Co-Director of the Design, Technology, and Radical Media Lab (DTRM), Co-Associate Director of the Duke-Duke Kunshan University Presence Lab, and Co-Lead of the Art, Media, and Cybernetics Working Group under the American Society for Cybernetics. Between 2027-2032, she will be an elected Trustee to the American Society for Cybernetics.
Erin Wilkerson / DKU
She is a filmmaker and mixed media artist specializing in both research and practice. Her current research in feral filmmaking proposes a methodology for exploring the tangential histories of colonial invasion and ecological crisis emerging from the Enlightenment era separation of human and nature. Her teaching interests are in filmmaking and criticism, essay film, hybrid documentary, photographic processes, mixed media art production, and art history as a form of social and cultural critique.
She is the co-founder of the art collective and film production company Creative Agitation, as well as the former Managing Editor of “Now,” the journal for cinematic praxis. She co-directed the film “Nuclear Family” (2021), with DKU Associate Professor, Travis Wilkerson which was awarded Mención Especial at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival and is distributed by Arsenal (Berlin). Her work has exhibited in the Venice Biennale, Locarno Film Festival, the Viennale, and the Berlinale. Her follow up film, “The Second Burial” (2023), streamed on MUBI. And she has published writing in the art and cinema journals La Furia Umana, Kino!, and Membrana.
She has a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Architecture/Landscape/Interiors, which solidified the ecological foundation for her work. And a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University in Research and filmmaking methodology, put into practice with the accompanying hybrid documentary film, “Strange Flower.” As part of her PhD coursework, she also taught global film and art practice.
EXHIBIT ARTISTS AND CURATORS BIOS
Tae Eun KIM / Dongyang University
Tae Eun Kim is a Korean media artist and Associate Professor at Dongyang University, where he leads the Department of Creative Film and Media. His artistic practice explores the intersections of technology, memory, sound, data, and social history through media installation, interactive art, AI-generated imagery, VR, and experimental moving images.
Kim has developed projects that transform historical archives, maps, environmental data, and recorded sound into immersive audiovisual experiences. His recent works investigate how invisible memories and suppressed histories can be translated into physical movement, data, and visual structures.
His works and research have been presented through exhibitions, screenings, and international art and technology platforms in Korea and abroad, including Sónar+D in Barcelona and cultural programs in Washington, D.C. He continues to develop interdisciplinary projects combining contemporary art, emerging technologies, and artistic research, with a particular interest in AI, interactive systems, and site-specific media installation.
JiYoon Chun, Artist
Media artist JiYoon Chun works across the boundaries of art, design, and technology, with a practice centered on interactive media art, augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI). She studied Environmental Sculpture at Gachon University, followed by Photography and Advertising Arts at Columbia College Chicago. She received an M.F.A. in Design from the School of Visual Arts and a Ph.D. in Art & Technology from the Graduate School of Media at Sogang University. Her work explores relationality between the self and the other, object and viewer, and reality and virtuality, examining how reality can be reconfigured through audience participation and interaction. Since 1995, she has exhibited at institutions including the National Asia Culture Center, Gyeongnam Art Museum, Ilmin Museum of Art, and Savina Museum of Contemporary Art. She is currently a professor at Seoul Media Institute of Technology, researching AI- and AR-based media art, site-specific public art, digital cultural heritage, and arts and culture education content.
Honey Huang, Student Clubs & Arts Coordinator, Duke Kunshan University
Born and raised in Islamabad, Pakistan, with family roots in Guangxi and Guangdong, China, Honey Huang brings a cross-cultural lens to her work in community engagement and the arts. She holds a dual degree from Duke Kunshan University and Duke University, where she majored in Media and Arts with a focus on documentary photography, short film production, and curatorial practice. She later earned a Master of Philosophy in China Studies (Philosophy & Religion) from Yenching Academy of Peking University, where her thesis investigated the intersection of contemporary Chinese art and religion in China. Her work is currently focused on fostering vibrant communities and meaningful connections through arts initiatives and student clubs.
Xinlan Shen, Undergraduate Student, Duke Kunshan University
Xinlan Shen is an Arts & Media student at Duke Kunshan University interested in photography, curatorial practice, documentary filmmaking and music and dance performance. As a student curator for Feeling into Form: Art, Movement, and the Making of Empathy, she has worked closely with artists and assisted the exhibition planning. She is keen on how curatorial practices deepen emotional connection, how artists turn concepts into forms, and how art fosters cross-cultural understanding.
Erine Xu, Undergraduate Student, Duke Kunshan University
Erine Xu is an undergraduate student at Duke Kunshan University and a cross-cultural art practitioner. Through daily illustration, hip-hop dance, and a deep engagement with mental health advocacy, her creative work explores personal resilience and psychological struggles. She is interested in how art and physical movement can bridge different worlds, fostering emotional resonance and shared common ground.
Goldi Shwe, Undergraduate Student, Duke Kunshan University
Goldi Shwe is a rising sophomore at Duke Kunshan University studying Media & Arts. Her practice explores art, documentary, and the ways visual media can engage with social and cultural experiences. She currently works as a student curatorial assistant for the exhibition Feeling into Form, featuring artists including Mona Hatoum and Mary Behrens. Moreover, she is interning as an assistant/social media manager at Arthouse Advisory. Through her roles, she has gained experience in artist and exhibition research, artist communication, installation planning, and curatorial production. During the summer, she participated in fieldwork in Thailand, developing documentary work with Professor Kaley Clements. Her interests span contemporary art, documentary filmmaking, and photography.
ART EXHIBIT
Feeling into Form: Art, Movement, and the Making of Empathy
Curatorial Statement
People move. They move across borders, between languages and cultures, toward new lives or away from danger. Sometimes movement is chosen; sometimes it is forced. Wherever people go, they carry memories, stories, sounds, images, and traditions. Movement shapes people: in turn, people reshape the art and cultures they encounter.
Feeling into Form asks what happens when these experiences take artistic form. What do we feel when we encounter another person’s movement, memory, or loss through art? How might that encounter change the way we see?
These questions return empathy to its artistic origins. The modern concept comes from Einfühlung, a German aesthetic idea meaning “feeling into”: entering imaginatively into the forms and movements of art. The works gathered here do more than depict migration, exile, violence, or cultural translation. Through image, sound, material, movement, fragmentation, and repetition, they invite us to encounter lives and histories beyond our own.
As you move through the exhibition, we invite you to cross boundaries, follow unfamiliar pathways, and re-member–to gather scattered fragments, reconnect silenced histories, and see differently.
Where might art take you? What might you see differently when you leave?
Artists and curatorial team: Tae Eun Kim, Ji Yoon Chun, Jung Choi, Kolleen M. Guy, Honey Huang, Xinlan Shen, Erine Xu, Goldi Shuwe
