East Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

我記得你微揚的長髮 I Remember You With Wind In Your Hair: Betty Jiu Solo Exhibition, Nicole M. Nepomuceno

Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia

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The Maghrebi Silk Road: A Medieval Exploration, Malak Ouammou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Maghrebi Silk Road: A Medieval Exploration is an interdisciplinary historical examination of a variety of intellectual and material cross-cultural interactions and connections between Asia and the Maghreb from 900 to 1492. It primarily revolves around agriculture, sericulture, and immaterial and material culture, with an emphasis on knowledge production and dissemination. In it, I focus on the Mediterranean endpoint of the Silk Road network, illustrating the Maghrebi Silk Road through an exploration of various case studies such as rice, silk, and storytelling that demonstrate the role of and the extent to which these “secondary” Silk Road routes existed and were …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Finding A Way Out Of The Filter Bubble: The Confusion Of A Heavy Social Media User, Longwen Miao

Masters Theses

This thesis studies how algorithmic recommendation systems reshape visual perception, aesthetic judgment, and the construction of selfhood within contemporary digital culture.

Everything begins with the experience of repeatedly encountering algorithmically recommended content on everyday digital platforms. On these platforms, images, sounds, and social interactions are continuously selected, repeated, and reorganized by predictive systems, forming an environment in which perception is constantly structured and adjusted.

From this observation, the research raises two central questions: how do algorithmic recommendation systems reshape visual perception, aesthetic judgment, and self-recognition, and how might these systems be intervened in or made perceptible through artistic practice? Within …

What Teachers See: Collaborative Artmaking In Chinese And U.S. Elementary Schools, Jiayu Shi

Masters Theses

This study explores how elementary art teachers in the United States and China perceive and use collaborative artmaking with their students. Driven by my personal journey as a Chinese student and art educator now studying in the U.S., this research asks: How do teachers in these two countries compare in their views of collaborative artmaking, including its social-emotional outcomes, benefits, and challenges. I conducted semi structured interviews with three elementary art teachers: two from China (one veteran, one early-career) and one from the U.S. with experience in both rural and urban schools. Findings show that teachers in both contexts value …

Domestic Travelers: Transparent Machines, Hollow Bodies, Hanyi Wang

Masters Theses

Digitization is not a modern invention. Derived from the concept of fingers, this mindset of packing information into quantifiable, interchangeable units sounds mechanical, yet eerily physical. Try to imagine: a ghostly hand with millions of fingers with the same length, likeness, and function. Under the worldview of Digital Narrative, we live in a digital simulation: everything is representable with quantifiable units, fluid across media. Yet under this spectacle of convenient abundance, something is missing. The Unknowables are replaced with arbitrary symbols, while the Uncategorizables are omitted. This is a framework that cannot accommodate human subtleties and complexities. One needs to …

Until The Ground Breaks, Annie Hu

Masters Theses

Until the Ground Breaks explores the complex relationship between personal memory, embodied experience, and internalized "archival logic." By examining long-term cross-cultural diasporic experiences and the shifting dynamics of family narratives—including the sensory experiences and fading memory of a grandmother, a father's correspondence that acts as a textual record of emotional logic, and the continuous revision of family history—this thesis dissects the psychological tremors that occur when the illusion of a singular, stable memory archive collapses. This research rejects the view of memory as a static container of truth, revealing it instead as a dynamic, unstable, and constantly rewritten living system. …

Made In Chimerica, Austin Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to answer how prop design may function as an effective vehicle to challenge notions of orientalism, an inquiry grounded for the purposes of this thesis in contemporary Asian diasporic experiences within the United States, and spark deeper questions regarding notions of assimilation, erasure, and cultural ownership. Cultural understanding of Asian American experiences have long been tethered by White-dominant frameworks to orientalist stereotypes that range from early xenophobic caricatures to more modern dehumanization attempts via techno orientalism and model minority myths. At its fundamental core, orientalism centralizes White-dominant narratives as the major filter by which to judge, interpret, …

破酆都 Calling Her Through The Gates, Yuqi Liu

Masters Theses

My practice centers on papermaking, printmaking, and artist books to explore fiber as both image and language. I treat paper not simply as a surface, but as a living material through which memory, labor, and history can be held. By making my own sheets from plant fibers, fungi, and other organic matter, I create works in which material and meaning are inseparable. Shaped by my engagement with the natural world, women’s history, and overlooked vernacular forms of knowledge, my work moves through cycles of life and death, presence and disappearance, fragility and resilience. My projects with mushrooms and mycelium led …

Governing Longevity: Biopolitics And Economic Restructuring In East Asian Aging Societies, Sherlyn She

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

How do rapidly aging societies govern longevity when demographic change threatens established welfare arrangements? This thesis examines aging governance in China, Japan, and South Korea to show how states simultaneously manage aging as a public-health problem and build it into an economic sector through what I term life capitalism.

Two interpretations of East Asian aging policy are widely circulated: that it is a peripheral case of Western neoliberalism, or a residue of Confucian familism. I reject both: the neoliberal reading captures marketization but misses the state as its active builder, since these states are expanding rather than retreating; the Confucian …

Asia Pacific Perspectives Vol. 19 No. 1, 2025, University Of San Francisco

Asia Pacific Perspectives

Articles

Think Pieces

Photo Essay

Book Reviews

A Description Of Zhao Zhang’S Nature No. 2 And Xiaoxuan Xu’S An Unusual Feast Of East, Sicheng He

Dissertations, 2020-current

This research presents a new path in the development of Chinese music by aiming to incorporate both modern Western and ancient Chinese influences in form, texture, tonality, topic, and other dimensions of style and structure. Two Chinese composers whose recent compositions for the piano share similar characteristics: Zhao Zhang (b. 1964; Nature no. 2, 2013) and Xiaoxuan Xu (b. 1990; An Unusual Feast of East, 2022). The research will discuss how Zhao Zhang and Xiaoxuan Xu accomplish this fusion of old and new in their recent piano works Nature no. 2, (2013) and An Unusual Feast of East, 2022. …

Closing The Revolution: The Criticize Water Margin Campaign And The Politics Of Surrender In Mao’S China, Yaowen Dong

Asia Pacific Perspectives

The mid 1970s witnessed a massive Maoist campaign to attack the late imperial vernacular fiction Water Margin, which had been previously favored by the Chinese Communist Party because of its elements of rebellion and egalitarianism. The paper examines the Criticize Water Margin Campaign in 1975 and 1976 that interpreted the fiction as class-reconciliation and surrender. I argue that the dramatic shift of the narratives surrounding Water Margin manifested the deeply embedded paradox between rebellion and normalization in the communist revolutionary project. Such paradox of revolution is not only the product of the infringement of the coming neoliberal world order, …

Selective Remembrance: Constructing Nostalgia At The Park Chung Hee Presidential Museum, Abigail Shaw

Honors Theses

How and why does Park Chung Hee remain so potent in the minds of South Koreans, decades after his rule? Seungsook Moon (2009) describes the phenomenon as Park Chung Hee Syndrome: a cultural condition in which Park’s image circulates between glorification, demonization, and humanization, producing an unresolved and emotionally charged field of memory. Building on this, researchers have examined how a type of “Park Chung Hee nostalgia” operates through selective remembrance of developmental success, moral discipline, and national unity, ultimately creating a positive memory and longing for semblance of his long-ended rule (Park, 2011; Podoler, 2016; Lee, 2022).

Statues and …

Through The Lens Of “Kigo”: Understanding Japanese American Wwii Poetry, Grace C. Shields

Honors College Theses

In 1957, nearly ten years after the closing of Tule Lake Segregation Center in Newell, California, the last of the ten War Relocation Authority (WRA) concentration camps to close, author Keiho Soga writes on a piece of paper:

“Untitled”

By: Keiho Soga

Beyond the forbidding fence 

Of doubled barbed wire 

The mountain, 

Aglow with purple,

Sends us its greetings.

In this brief moment of reflection, Soga recounts his time in Sand Island Internment Camp, another of the Japanese American internment camps established during World War II by the United States government after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. …

Exploring Identity Through Clay: A Humanistic Art Therapy Case Study With A Blind Chinese Adoptee, Virginia Jade Leicht

Expressive Therapies Theses

This qualitative case study explored how working with clay in art therapy can help support a blind man’s identity exploration. This paper addresses the problem of many traditional therapeutic approaches within the art therapy realm: They rely too heavily on visual engagement, which can limit the accessibility and opportunities for self-exploration and identity development for those who are blind. The study was grounded in current research and foundational theories based on the humanistic art therapy approach. Clay is considered an accessible medium that engages multiple senses and allows for emotional exploration and meaning making, specifically through tactile and sensory-based engagement …

"Obsessive Myth:" Disturbing The Grammar Of The Lyric And Epic In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's "Dictee", Noelle (Nell) Kriegel

All Theses

The archival text Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha spans many genres, making it a highly hybrid text. Cha uses personal letters, official government documents, images, prose, dictation exercises, translations, and poetry to create a composite identity of women neglected through history. Dictée’s hybrid form allows it to experiment with the lyric and epic traditions, challenging their forms to adequately reflect the lived experience of oppressed women. Dictée’s hybridity is but one aspect of its interrogation of literary form and language; the text also plays with grammar, specifically pronouns, to depict a genealogy of female voices as they relate to …

An Introduction To East Asian Art: Tour Guide #3, The Year 1591, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This tour guide is the third in Victoria Weston's An Introduction to East Asian Art in Three Journeys. To access the full book, visit https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/3/

For the remaining sections, visit:

Guide Part 1: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/4/

Guide Part 2: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/5/ This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally encourage comparative …

An Introduction To East Asian Art: Tour Guide #2, The Year 1230, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This is the second of three tour guides connected to Victoria Weston's Introduction to East Asian Art. For the full guidebook, visit https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/3/

The remaining sections can be found at these links:

Guide Part 1: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/4/

Guide Part 3: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/6/

This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally …

An Introduction To East Asian Art: Tour Guide #1, The Year 748, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This book is chapter one of Victoria Weston's Introduction to East Asian Art in Three Journeys, which can be found in full at https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/3/

For the remaining chapters, visit:

Guide Part 2: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/5/

Guide Part 3: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/6/

This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally encourage comparative analysis. …