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Nashuyuan Serenity Wang

Nashuyuan has been living in the UK since 2009 at the age of 14. She graduated from the University of Warwick (2017 BA: Film and Television Studies) and UCL (2018 MA: Film Studies). She is particularly interested in the representation of cultural identity, the geo-emotive mapping, and space and architecture in Chinese and Asian cinemas. She has been working as the media journalist for the European Times and Chinese weekly, the judge and film reviewer for Beloit International Film Festival, cultural writer and PR manager for Chinese Food Festival, and the Cultural Media Chief Editor at FusionPay.

Nashuyuan’s thesis focuses on psycho-geography and the travels of the suffering female body in the 21st century Chinese cinema of dislocation. The project will ask how women’s journeys taken in pursuit of a variety of ‘homecomings’ have been animated through spatio-temporal mappings of gender – mappings that draw on, yet disturb, pre-modern traditions and contemporary issues of socio-cultural and sensorial journeying. Writing against the problematic encounter between tradition and modernity, the ever-present past that is embedded in China’s cultural imagination and the comparative studies of various urban-rural encounters will be made visible in this thesis. This dissertation embarks on a methodological journey linking historical maps with the spatial analysis of cinematographic spiritual or psycho-geography with allegorical and spectral figures that remain familiar to the contemporary Chinese audience. Little academic attention has been paid to how they inhabit rural cinema as a genre, and specifically representations of the experience of women in pain. The journeys they make in search of healing and resolution, often fruitlessly, tend to take them outside of traditional gender roles, conventional urban-centric spaces and into what she calls the ‘cinema of dislocation.’

PhD

Supervisor: Vivienne Lo (first supervisor); Keith Wagner (second supervisor)
Working title: Psycho-geography and the travels of the suffering female body in the 21st century Chinese cinema of dislocation
Expected completion date: 2021

Publications

‘Examine the relationship between space and cinema in the work of Michelangelo Antonioni’ , Film Matters (to be published in the summer issue)

‘Longing for Rain: Journeys into the Dislocated Female Body of Urban China’, Vivienne Lo and Serenity Nashuyuan Wang(co-author), in Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities, (eds.) Lo, V.; Berry, C and Guo L., 2019, Routledge  (to be published this year)

 “Coffin In the Mountain” , film piece published on Yimovi (Chinese Health and Humanities).
https://www.yimovi.com/en/movies/coffin-in-the-mountain 
 

Conference papers and presentations

‘Filmic architect or architectural filmmaker? Michelangelo Antonioni’s space and architecture’, Intersection/Intersezioni Conference, Kent State University, May 2018

‘Longing For Rain: spectral lovers and the new urban spaces of middle-class Beijing’, with Vivienne Lo, UCL Health Humanities Seminar, Chinese Medical Humanity, University College London, November 2018

‘The Representation of Time and Spatio-temporal relation of the Globalisd Asia in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together’, Mediating ‘China’ PhD Symposium, Film Department, University of Southampton, May 2019

‘Consuming the Paradoxical Global Time: the representation of a globalised space-time relation in Tsai Ming-Liang’s What Time Is It There?’, Intersection/Intersezioni Conference, Kent State University, May 2019

"Mario's research focusses on multi-ethnic cooperation, bilingualism, dynastic loyalty and the emergence of nationalisms in the Habsburg port cities of Trieste and Fiume/Rijeka in the 1848-1867 period. Given his interest in the history of the eastern Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire through the centuries, he is currently a teaching assistant in the "History of the Modern Middle East" module".

2020 BAFTSS ‘Rethinking Screen Cultures’ Conference 
University of St. Andrew’s
Title: Screening dislocation in despair: how the neo-liberal left- behinds are projected through visual-acoustic-scapes in the 21st century Chinese cinema.

2020 ASEN Annual Conference 
University of Edinburgh
Title: Nationalism and the Nation - the representation of female body in socialist Chinese cinema.

2019 Trinity History Conference
Trinity College Dublin
Title: Spatialising forbidden desires in contemporary Chinese cinema  
2019 Post-1989 Chinese queer cinema 1989's Loose Ends Conference

UCL
Title: Spatialising the history and memories of forbidden desires: physical and fantasied queer identities within entangled temporalities in the 1990s Chinese queer cinema
2019 Paper presented in ‘The Interdependency of Chinese Cinema’ conference UK
UCL

‘Distinct Dialogues in Unison: how regionalisation creates the foreign familiar/intimate otherness in Chinese-Korean film collaborations’  

Teaching 

2018 - present
- Chinese Film and the Body (giving lectures on Chinese cinema and Chinese feminism and teaching film theories and analysis)
- Supervising MA students’ essays

Work

2020
-Film and Drama Studies Tutor (Short Course) for Blue Education UK 

2019
- Consultant at China Information and Advice Centre UK