ChinaComx PhD Candidate Jiu Song will head to Hamburg this June to share her research at the international workshop Entangled Images: Early 20th-Century Chinese Popular Culture and Western Collections. Hosted by the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at the University of Hamburg on 11-12 June 2026, the workshop examines visual media, knowledge production, and collecting practices across China and the West.
Jiu will speak in the panel “Narrative Entanglements” (13:30-14:30) on 11 June 2026. Her presentation, titled “The Reader Inside the Panels: Shaping and Mobilising Readers in 1950s Lianhuanhua (1954-1956)”, argues that 1950s lianhuanhua never settled on one steady reader, holding the reader in two places at once: an object to be shaped and a subject to be mobilised, two sides of a single editorial move rather than two stages in time. She first reads works from 1955-1956 that stage children reading, where one posture (a child bent over a book) can mark the model reader or the ruined one, so captions, supporting characters, and graded endings, not the image alone, settle the verdict. She then turns to the Mass-Creation 群众创作 column of Lianhuanhua Bao 连环画报, where some readers, trained into the qualified type, were encouraged to pick up the brush, and their work became models for others to learn and copy. A medium carried over from the Republican period, she argues, was retooled to make its readers.