East Asia Program Lecture Series presents “Walls-as-Media: Between Cheng (Wall-City) and Ping (Wall-Screen)"

Speaker: Jinying Li, Assistant Professor, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University

Description:

As global networks promise boundless access, we are facing increasing layers of walls. From computer firewalls to China’s Great Firewall, from the Facebook wall to the virtual walls in virtual reality, digital media, in fact, are largely walled. The existence of these walls shatters the myth of what Manuel Castells has famously called “the space of flows,” and highlights the significant functions of walled enclosure in managing, controlling, and mediating information, knowledge, and experience. It problematizes the enlightenment ideals of transparency, depth, openness, and universal knowledge, and underlines walled mediation as the fundamental condition of modern experience. My talk proposes a theoretical framework to explore the meanings and functions of the wall in media history by studying its archeological formation as a media device as well as its genealogical development as a discursive metaphor. I first examine the media archeology of the wall as a material artifact, focusing on cheng 城 (wall-city) and ping 屏 (wall-screen) as two archetypal walls in Chinese media history. In their various renditions and configurations, both cheng and ping define the wall as an asymmetrical and contradictory structure, which is simultaneously a blocking barrier that encloses a territory and community as well as a displaying surface that expresses feelings and powers. This duality between a barrier and a surface further informs the genealogy of wall as a discursive formation, which I examine by comparing the development of the wall as a structure metaphor with that of the window metaphor in the competing conceptions of screen as a media system. I argue that the wall presents an alternative genealogy from the window, shifting from optical apparatus to spatial devices. This conceptual shift from the window to the wall, from optical projection to spatial construction, is also a move away from the perspective-centric conceptualization of modern media, pointing toward surface-oriented media configurations of environmental management, mobility control and socio-political demarcation.

Speaker Bio: Jinying Li is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she teaches media theory, animation, and digital culture in East Asia. She co-edited two special issues on Chinese animation for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and a special issue on regional platforms for Asiascape: Digital Asia. Her first book, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), explores the connection between the anime boom and global geekdom. She is currently competing her second book project, Walled Media and Mediating Walls. Jinying is also a filmmaker and has worked on animations, feature films, and documentaries. Two documentary TV series that she produced were broadcasted nationwide in China through Shanghai Media Group (SMG). She is one of the co-writers of animated feature film Big Fish and Begonia (Dayu Haitang, 2016). She also produced an experimental VR documentary 47km (2017) in collaboration with Chinese director Zhang Mengqi at Beijing Film Academy.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.