ChinaComx PhD Candidate Aijia Zhang is to take part in this semester’s CATS Forum, “New Projects, New Initiatives, Work-in-Progress,” held this Friday, 22 May 2026, from 2-5 PM at HCTS, Room 212. The forum seeks to promote CATS’ interdisciplinary intellectual exchange, mutual inspiration, and knowledge generation. It brings together scholars working across Asian regions and disciplines to share ongoing and emerging research projects.
Aijia will present an ongoing chapter on the materiality of lianhuanhua titled Lianhuanhua in Practice: From Visual Form to Material Networks. Her presentation will begin at 15:15. Read more about Aijia’s chapter in the abstract:
In this chapter, I examine the materiality of lianhuanhua as a medium, practice, and cultural product. Integrating insights from Hannah Miodrag and Bruno Latour, I conceptualize lianhuanhua as a material-semiotic network in which meaning and cultural knowledge are produced. Drawing on a large corpus of metadata and critical essays, I employ computational methods to map and visualize networks of production and circulation, revealing how lianhuanhua meaning is assembled, stabilized, and transformed across contexts.