Book launch: 'Animation Thinks: A Story of Media Entanglements in China'
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:30 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- Room G3
- Event type
- Launch
About this event
This is the book launch of Dr Panpan Yang's new book Animation Thinks, followed by a drinks reception. The event is hosted by Dr Carwyn Morris (SOAS). Professor Joshua Jiehong Jiang (Birmingham City University) and Dr Annabella Mei Massey (Courtauld) will serve as the interlocutors.
Animation Thinks charts a fragmentary history of Chinese animation from the 1920s to the present. Focusing on animation's encounters with other art forms, including photography, painting, calligraphy, and porcelain, Panpan Yang examines contemporary Chinese animation trans-spatially, tracing how the meaning of Chinese animated works subtly shifts when moving between spaces such as the film industry and the contemporary art world.
Ultimately, Yang argues that Chinese animation thinks time and space to a degree unimaginable in other media, offering an understanding of space that is neither completely graphic nor entirely photographic and an understanding of time as heterogeneous, disruptive, and surprising.
Registration
This event is open to the public and free to attend; however, registration is required. This event is taking place on campus and will not be recorded or live-streamed.
Organiser
This event has been organised by the SOAS China Institute.
Image credit: Jingyu Liu on Unsplash
About the author
Dr Panpan Yang
Dr Panpan Yang is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at SOAS University of London. She holds a BA from Peking University, an MA from New York University, and a PhD from the University of Chicago. From 2023 to 2025, she was the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded research project Calligraphic Imagination in Contemporary Chinese Art and Emergent Media. With Jiang Jiehong, she co-edited a 2025 special issue of Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art on the theme of the moving image.
About the interlocutors
Professor Jiang Jiehong
Professor Jiang Jiehong is Director of the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts at Birmingham City University and Principal Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Intellect). His curatorial projects include the Guangzhou Triennial (2012), Asia Triennial Manchester (2014), The Shadow Never Lies (2016), the first Thailand Biennale (2018–19), and This Is Shanghai (2018). His major publications include Burden or Legacy (2007), The Revolution Continues (2008), Red: China’s Cultural Revolution (2010), An Era without Memory (2015), The Art of Contemporary China (2021), The Otherness of the Everyday (2021), and The Conformed Body (2024).
Dr Annabella Mei Massey
Dr Annabella Mei Massey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow researching visual and literary culture in post-reform China, particularly urban and rural environments. She holds degrees from the University of Warwick and the University of Oxford, where her doctoral thesis won the British Association for Chinese Studies Best Doctoral Thesis Award in 2023. Her forthcoming monograph, The Edges of the City, examines Chinese cities as frontier spaces in contemporary cinema, art and literature. Her second project, Augmented Ruralism, explores representations of rural China transformed by real and speculative technologies.
About the chair
Dr Carwyn Morris
Dr Carwyn Morris is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Digital Society and Geography in the Department of Media Studies and a Research Fellow at the SOAS China Institute. He holds a PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies from the LSE. His research explores China’s influence on digital societies, focusing on wanghong (internet fame), digital territory, cultural industries, digital activism, and Chinese social media worldwide. He is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant CHINA.EU, which investigates Chinese capital in Europe’s cultural industries, their impact on urban spaces, and the role of Chinese social media and digital technologies.
Contact
Email: sci@soas.ac.uk
'Animation Thinks' book cover and book launch poster
