Dr Panpan Yang

An interdisciplinary scholar by training, Panpan Yang works at the intersections of art history, screen studies, East Asian studies, and digital humanities. She is particularly interested in a form of art historical writing that has conceptual dimensions or involves methodological innovations. Her work demonstrates a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to archival research, material practices, close visual analysis, computer-aided vision, and cross-cultural modes of theorisation.  

Her first academic monograph, Animation Thinks: A Story of Media Entanglements in China, is under contract with University of California Press. In it, she traces the history of Chinese animation from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on animation’s encounters with other artforms, including photography, painting, calligraphy, and porcelain. One goal of this book is to set a model for the formal analysis of animation, which borrows vocabulary from both art history and screen studies. She proposes a form of trans-spatial thinking to examine contemporary Chinese animation: to trace, document, and explain how the meaning of a work of Chinese animation subtly changes when it moves in and out of the world of the film industry, the sphere of contemporary art, and other spaces.  

With Shane McCausland, she is the Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project on calligraphic imagination in contemporary art and emergent media (2023-25). Expanding inquiries into the digital future, she was a collaborating partner on the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded digital humanities research ‘The Media Ecology Project.’ Her research has also been supported by the Getty Foundation, the Sino-British Fellowship Trust, and others.   

Panpan’s creative work also extends across a variety of disciplines and media. Most of her films take inspiration from art historical sources. She is the recipient of China’s National Young Screenwriter Award, the Domitor Essay Award, the Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award Nomination, and an Honourable Mention from the Association for Chinese Animation Studies, and among other awards.  

In 2021, Panpan joined SOAS as a lecturer (assistant professor) in the Arts and Visual Cultures of Modern China. Since then, she has been working closely with faculty and graduate students with diverse interests in the arts and cultures of China, art theory and criticism, cinematic arts, and digital art history. 

Panpan Yang’s research explores the possibilities of a minor discourse to deterritorialise the terrains of both art history and screen studies. 

Her areas of academic interests include 

• the arts and visual cultures of China and the Sinophone world 
• contemporary art 
• films in East and Southeast Asia 
• animation 
• digital arts 
• AI and art practices 
• new media 
• art theory and criticism 
• cultural flows 
• interactions between Chinese and African arts 
• space, place, and landscape 
• medium and materiality 
• intermediality 
• gender and genre 
• Chinese literature 
• ethnic minorities in China 
• Teochew opera, cinema, and material cultures