ChinaComx PhD candidate Aijia Zhang is undertaking two research stays during autumn 2026 as part of her doctoral research on lianhuanhua.
From 21 September to 15 October, she is hosted by the Machine Visual Culture: Artificial Intelligence and the History of Seeing research group at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. There, she continues developing her project, “Beyond Empty Space: Quantifying Liubai in Chinese Comics (Lianhuanhua)”, which combines computational image analysis and digital humanities approaches to investigate the visual distribution of empty space in lianhuanhua and its relationship to the Chinese aesthetic concept of liubai (留白).
From 19 October to 20 November, Aijia will be a guest of Thomas Smits, Assistant Professor of Digital History and AI, at the University of Amsterdam. During this stay, she will work on building and expanding a multimodal dataset and database of lianhuanhua, integrating textual, visual, and bibliographic information from her dissertation corpus.