Speaker: Zoe Meng Jiang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, May 12, 2026
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
All are welcome. Registration is required.
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=106449
This talk examines early reform-era video watching in China—a semi-public, quasi-legal practice that became a dominant form of cultural consumption and social activity. Video cassettes decentralized audiovisual reproduction and consumption, generating a reality beyond state intentions. Their proliferation fostered a new homosociality: male spectators identifying not with nationalism but a transnational Confucian brotherhood, sustained by Hong Kong action films. The state’s shifting tolerance of video halls marks the inauguration of a mode of post-socialist rule in which spatial forms of organization matter as much as the ideology of cultural content.
Zoe Meng Jiang is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She researches media theory and history, social practice, gender and feminism, and moving-image arts. Her recent and forthcoming publications appear in the Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Art Asia Pacific, The Brooklyn Rail, and Artforum China, among others.
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