Sound, Image, and Popular Media at the Nexus of Global-China

This event is part of the Film Studies Research Seminar, and will be chaired by Chris Berry with Dr. Ying Xiao presenting the seminar. 

Film and film sound present a complex picture of contemporary Chinese culture—a culture shaped by political ideologies, global economic trends, China’s embrace of popular culture and everyday life, and new cultural contacts. An original study of sound in the film and media industry of China, especially its music and multilingual soundtrack, my book, China in the Mix: Cinema, Sound, and Popular Culture in the Age of Globalization, explores Chinese films, expressions, and culture from a unique, cohesive acoustic angle and through the prism of global media-cultural exchange. It shows how the complex, evolving uses of sound (popular music, voice-over, silence, noise, and audio mixing) in film and media reflect and engage the important cultural and socio-historical shifts in contemporary China and in the increasingly networked world. In the talk, I focus on the films of Zhang Yimou in particular, one of the most prominent Chinese filmmakers, to illustrate the multifaceted connections between sound and image that tap into cultural tropes and highlight moments of sociocultural transformations in the global age. I will also talk about my next book project, which is a historiography research examining film dubbing, the import, translation, and exhibition of Western films, and the dynamic film-cultural exchange activities that have actually underpinned PRC’s sociopolitical life in the second half of the twentieth century.

Dr. Ying Xiao is an associate professor of Chinese studies and film and media studies at the University of Florida. She received her Ph.D. from Cinema Studies at New York University. Her teaching and research interests primarily concentrate on Chinese-language films (mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong), Chinese in Hollywood, Classical Hollywood cinema in the sound era, popular music, youth culture, sound studies, theories of globalization and transnationalism, Buddhism and film, and the discourse of gender and sexuality. She is the book author of China in the Mix: Cinema, Sound, and Popular Culture in the Age of Globalization (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and has published articles on neoliberalism and Chinese film industry, Chinese hip hop culture, Chinese rock ‘n’ roll film, and Chinese documentaries. Before joining the University of Florida, she was involved in a series of TV and documentary productions. She has participated in the curatorship of Reel China Documentary Film Festival since 2004 and organized “DV China and Social Change” film series and workshop in 2011, “Sound of China: Folklore, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Chinese Hip Hop” symposium in 2013, “Shanghai in a Global Context: Cinema, Media, and the Crossing of Imaginations” international workshop in 2017, and “Gender, Disability, and the Chinese Muslim’s Encounters with Cultural Traditions and a Modernized World” symposium and film series in 2019.Dr. Xiao sits on editorial boards and serves as a reviewer for academic journals, presses, and grants. She has actively partaken in and facilitated a number of international film festivals and also holds visiting research and professor positions from Fudan University, Xiamen University, Yangzhou University, and Zhejiang University.

All are welcome to attend. No booking is required.