AI Imaginaries and Aesthetics in China
This project examines how AI and robotics are represented and performed within China’s creative industries. Through ethnographic fieldwork and media analysis, it explores how these technologies are not only engineered but also culturally produced, shaped through aesthetic, symbolic, and affective practices. Focusing on robotic agents and digital personas in exhibitions, performances, and social media, the project analyzes how gendered and relational identities are encoded in machine design and interaction. It highlights the role of aesthetic labor in making emerging technologies intelligible and desirable, bridging automation with affect and innovation with ideology. The research contributes to debates in feminist technoscience, media studies, and the anthropology of technology by developing a critical framework for understanding the aesthetics and performativity of nonhuman subjects.
Representation and Performativity of Whiteness: The Case of Foreign Digital Entrepreneurs
My PhD dissertation, Representation and Performativity of Whiteness: The Case of Foreign Digital Entrepreneurs, examines how race and gender are mobilized as entrepreneurial capital in China’s digital economy. Drawing on digital ethnography of social media platforms, it explores how foreign migrants strategically perform identity within platform-mediated markets. The research shows that success depends not just on technical skills but on becoming algorithmically visible, aesthetically legible, and affectively engaging. It highlights the performative labor required in digital economies and how platform infrastructures shape and recalibrate racial and gender hierarchies. The dissertation advances a critical framework for understanding identity as a dynamic and extractable asset in the context of global mobility and digital capitalism.