Kwok-kan Tam – författare

This book presents new and original essays that capture the enigmatic and intriguing personal and imagined worlds of Chinese writers and artists in diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Including chapters on artist-writers such as Gao Xingjian, Dai Sijie, Ha Jin and Hong Ying, Tyrus Wong and Shen Wei, the book explores personal cross-cultural experiences through their literary and other artistic works, reflecting on their cultural identity, their native home and their new home, the past and the present. By writing, filming and painting about their diaspora/diasporic experience, they are writing about their selves and the traumatic experience many of them have gone through in forgetting the past, forgiving the damage, and foreshadowing a future by re-visioning their selves. Their experience represents a generation’s quest for an identity of being Chinese but culturally distanced from China.

As a study of cross-cultural human experience through the lens of literature, film and other arts, this book will not only appeal to students and scholars of Chinese diaspora studies, it will also appeal to those with an interest in Chinese literature, film and culture.

This book presents new and original essays that capture the enigmatic and intriguing personal and imagined worlds of Chinese writers and artists in diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Including chapters on artist-writers such as Gao Xingjian, Dai Sijie, Ha Jin and Hong Ying, Tyrus Wong and Shen Wei, the book explores personal cross-cultural experiences through their literary and other artistic works, reflecting on their cultural identity, their native home and their new home, the past and the present. By writing, filming and painting about their diaspora/diasporic experience, they are writing about their selves and the traumatic experience many of them have gone through in forgetting the past, forgiving the damage, and foreshadowing a future by re-visioning their selves. Their experience represents a generation’s quest for an identity of being Chinese but culturally distanced from China.

As a study of cross-cultural human experience through the lens of literature, film and other arts, this book will not only appeal to students and scholars of Chinese diaspora studies, it will also appeal to those with an interest in Chinese literature, film and culture.

This volume presents a broad coverage of theoretical issues that deal with digital culture, representation and ideology in art and museums, and other cultural sites, offering new insights into issues of representation in the digitization of art. It critically examines the roles of museum and archives in the digital age and reexamines the intricate relations between sight and site in art, museums, exhibitions, theme parks, theatre performances, music videos, and films. The collection represents a multidisciplinary approach to the complex issues underlying the advent of technologies and digital culture. The rise of visual culture since the twentieth century can be accounted for by the advent of technology in film, TV, museum exhibitions, and the wide use of websites, but it can also be understood as a paradigmatic shift toward representation as a visual means to interpret culture, with new understandings of the site-sight dilemma and the co-implications in related tensions. Complicating the issue of representation is the rise of digital culture, as digital sites replace actual physical sites. This book explores how the virtual has replaced the actual, and in what ways, and to what effects, the digital has displaced the physical. With contributions by museum curators, communications scholars, visual artists, theatre artists, filmmakers, literary critics, and historians, this volume is of appeal to academics and graduate students in information science, art, media, performance, literary and cultural studies, and history.

 “The book binds together different concepts such as site, sight and digitalization in a very original way. It convincingly gathers contributions from academics and practitioners, artists and museum specialists. The chapters are theoretically well-founded, show an interesting breadth of content and are also dealing with current developments.”— Monika Gänssbauer, Professor of Chinese and Head of the Institute of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden

This volume reshapes a contemporary understanding of research in theatre and performance arts. Bringing together distinguished scholars from all over the world, the book serves as an arena for international scholars to introduce innovative research methodologies and disseminate their research findings regarding VLT, data archiving, and digital history and discusses the impacts of digital culture in art production, stage performance, film, and literature. The Ibsen focus in the book is illustrative of the power of digital database research that is generating new relations in spatial-historical dimensions that have otherwise gone unnoticed. It demonstrates how a new methodology can bring practical benefits to handling big data with the support of digital technologies. In line with the post-pandemic landscape, this book engages a reflection on how the digital revolution has brought about changes and challenges, and constraints and breakthroughs within the field of theatre and performance arts. It is of appeal to theatre artists and practitioners, scholars, critics, librarians, digital archive engineers, and postgraduate students interested in theatre, performance studies, digital media, information technology, library science, communication, education, sociology, as well as political science.  

“The book investigates the latest methodological development in digital cultures and performance arts, which significantly contributes to the ever-changing and increasingly advanced technological culture in this field.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 - Jessica Tsui-yan Li, York University, Canada

"In line with the post-pandemic landscape, this book engages the reader in reflecting on how the digital revolution has brought about chances and challenges, constraints and breakthroughs to the field of theatre and performance arts. An original, eye-opening and inspiring volume at multiple levels, this book brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world."

                                              - Dr Anna Tso,  The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong