Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (February 3 - May 2):
Lyuwenyu Zhang’s dissertation is titled Keeping Other Memories: Inside Unofficial Chinese Moving Image Archives, and during this fellowship, she will be writing and researching for one chapter focusing on the private film archive of a Shanghai collector, Liu Debao. Liu’s collection includes rarely-seen moving image materials of Chinese cinema from the 1960s and ’70s, spanning from thousands of film prints and several 8.75mm projectors to original movie posters. Drawing from disciplines like historiography and cultural studies, Zhang’s research project theorizes Liu’s archive as an important yet overlooked nexus point that functions as a site of memory-making activities that generate cultural discourses on nostalgia in contemporary China. Overall, Zhang’s dissertation seeks to dive into the afterlives of the moving image materials and questions the functions of the Chinese archives not only as vessels of storage and preservation but also as living and evolving cultural organisms that shape our understanding of past, present, and future.