So it’s been a while since I posted on here (more than a year!) and I’m afraid I don’t have much to report about Chinese comics, for the moment at least. It’s a been a big year: after five fantastic years in Canada, my wife (Chinese) and I (American) finally successfully applied for permanent residence…and […]
Ah, Mid-Autumn Festival. A time of coming together, a time of thanks, but most of all, a time of…mooncakes. What are mooncakes you ask? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Often compared (in both shape and density) to a hockey puck, the mooncake is one of China’s most iconic pastries. Traditionally filled with lotus […]
The following is based on a presentation I gave for the 2017 Association of Asian Studies annual conference in Toronto as part of the panel Materia Manhuanica: Reading Chinese Cartoons on March 16, 2017. Funding for this panel was generously provided by the Huang Yao Foundation, with Eileen Chow serving as discussant. Additional revisions were […]
This list will be updated as new works are found or published. For Chinese language works, title translations are my own, unless otherwise marked. Suggest a comic here! Boxer Legends 《义和团传说故事》 series from Tianjin Fine Arts Press 天津美术出版社 1. Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King Li 《托塔李天王》 Han Zuo 翰左, illustrated by Feng Zhichao 冯志超. May, 1959, F60, […]
The following is based on a short talk on Chinese science fiction which I had the honor of presenting to the CHIN 40: Popular Culture in Modern Chinese Societies course at UCLA on February 16, 2017, at the invitation of Micheal Berry. I had originally planned on posting this a couple of weeks after giving […]
The Japanese occupation of China, beginning with the annexation of Manchuria in 1932, and culminating in full-scale invasion via Shanghai in 1937, forms a key turning point in the history of modern China. If this seems like an odd (or inauspicious, or even politically incorrect) jumping off point for a review of Zhang Yimou’s latest […]
The following is based on a lecture on Chinese comics which I had the pleasure of presenting to the Asian Art and Visual Culture working group at the Townsend Center for Humanities at UC Berkeley on February 3, 2017, at the invitation of Hannibal Taubes and Weihong Bao. I’ve edited the original text slightly to […]
This morning I realized that September marked my tenth year of studying Chinese. It’s put me in something of a reflective mood, so bear with me while I reminisce (or feel free to go watch this video of a porcupine eating pumpkins instead). Ten years ago I had just started my third year of community […]
In my experience learning Chinese over the past decade, one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is getting enough practice reading (and writing) characters: “Study them every day, use them every day” 天天学，天天用 1 Characters take an inordinate amount of time to memorize, and the lack of spaces between words means that proper nouns, set phrases, […]
The Vancouver International Film Festival is town again and all I can say is, man, time flies. While much of my work to date has focused on Chinese comics, I’ve been trying to find a natural way to transition to a broader focus that encompasses my interests in Chinese literature and film. Page from an […]