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Dr. PAN Lu
PolyU Scholars Hub

Dr. PAN Lu

Acting Head and Associate Professor

Visual culture and art, urban culture, media theories, space, film, cultural memory, war monuments in modern and contemporary Greater China, inter–asia cultural studies, colonialism in East Asia, island studies

Research Overview

Dr. Pan's research interests cover a wide range of topics in Cultural Studies, with a focus on visual culture, city, media and memory. She is author of three monographs on public visual politics in East Asian cities (2015), memory and urban space in Berlin and Shanghai (2016) and war monuments in Great China (2020).

Dr. Pan is actively engaged in creating new approaches in Humanities that bridge academic research and artistic/curatorial practices.

In addition to her academic research and teaching, Dr. Pan is an active curator and video artist. Her essay films, co-directed with Bo Wang, include Traces of an Invisible City (2016), Miasma, Plants and Export Paintings (2017), which received Award for Excellence, 32nd Image Forum Festival, Tokyo, Japan, and Many Undulating Things (2019). She was one of the curators of Kuandu Biennale, Taipei, 2018. In collaboration with Japanese artist Yu Araki, she has finished in 2021 a new experimental film Anachronic Chronicles: Voyages Inside/Out Asia, based on home videos shot between the 1960s and the 1990s from around East Asia.

Education and Academic Qualifications

  • PhD, Dept. of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR (2010)
  • M.A., Intercultural Anglophone Studies, University Bayreuth, Germany (2005)
  • B.A., Chinese as Foreign Language, Shanghai International Studies University, China (2003)

Academic and Professional Experience

  • Visiting scholar, School of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan (19.Mar. – 25. Mar., 2018)
  • Artist–in–Residence, Center for Art and Urbanistic, Berlin, Germany (01. Nov. – 31. Dec., 2016)
  • Researcher–in–Residence, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan (21. May– 23 Jun, 2016)
  • Lecturer, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (09/2013 – 05/2014)
  • Visiting Fellow, Harvard–Yenching Institute, Special Training Program in Urban Studies (09/2011 – 06/2012)
  • College Lecturer, Domain of Media and Cultural Studies, The University of Hong Kong SPACE Community College, Hong Kong (08/2010 – 07/2015)
  • Visiting Scholar, in Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany (06/2008 – 09/2008 and 07/2009 – 08/2009)

Research Interests

  • visual culture and art
  • urban culture
  • media theories
  • space
  • film
  • cultural memory
  • war monuments in modern and contemporary Greater China
  • colonialism in East Asia
  • island studies

Research Output

Monographs:

  • Image, Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Monuments in Greater China. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. 2020. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9789811596735
  • In–Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai. Bern: Peter Lang, Eurosinica Vol.15, 2016.
  • Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities. Bristol/Chicago:Intellect/U Chicago Press, 2015.

 

Edited Volumes:

  • The (Im)possibility of Art Archive: Theories and Experience in/from Asia. Shanghai and Hong Kong: KCL Publishing and Phantom Archives, 2023.
  • 𝙏𝙝𝙚 70'𝙨 𝘽𝙞𝙬𝙚𝙚𝙠𝙡𝙮: 𝙎𝙤𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝘼𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙢 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘼𝙡𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝘾𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙡 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙙𝙪𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙞𝙣 1970𝙨 𝙃𝙤𝙣𝙜 𝙆𝙤𝙣𝙜. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 2023. 
    https://hkupress.hku.hk/The_70's_Biweekly?fbclid=IwAR3M-jGJd9E5Q-5X18hgbJUkppFMj036VgPZdjbA4OlxixLQ61Bv3-cuQ4Y
  • Politics and Aesthetics of Creativity: City, Culture and Space in East Asia, co–edited with Dixon HWWong and Karin Ling–Fung Chau, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, 2015.
  • Ed. with Bo Wang, "The Obsolete and The Resurrected: Archaeological Cinema in Asia", Non-Fiction 05, Feb. 2023, E-Journal of Open City Documentary Festival, London:https://opencitylondon.com/non-fiction/

  • "New Left without Old Left: The 70’s Biweekly and Youth Activism in 1970s Hong Kong." Modern China 48:5 (2022), 1080-1112. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004221091924
  • Solomon, John and Lu Pan "Bordering Hong Kong: Towards a heterotopic ‘elsewhere’", Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Special Issue "Bordering Hong Kong: Aesthetics and Politics", Volume (8): Issue (1), July, 2021: 3-12
  • “Between Iconic Image and (Artificial) Ruins: Shanghai Sihang Warehouse and World War II Memory in China.” Visual Communication (2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357220964819.
  • "(Forgotten) Landscape of Imperial War Memories in a Colonial City: Hong Kong's Cenotaph and Beyond (1920s – 1960s)", The Chinese Historical Review, 27:2 (2020), 93-118, DOI: 10.1080/1547402X.2020.1831174
  • "Imagining Asia through a Tour of the Orient: Cathay Pacific’s Contemporary Art in Asia Exhibition of 1965". Twentieth-Century China, 45, no. 3 (2020): 308-330. muse.jhu.edu/article/765148.
  • “The Making of Gòng / Kyō – Visual Archive and the Common in Contemporary East Asia.” Inter–Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2018): 431–48.
  • “Socially Engaged Archive: Art, Media and Public Memory in East Asia.” Media Theory [Online], 2.1 (29 Jul. 2018): 222–244. Available at: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/44.
  • “Translating visual archives: on the Making of the New through Three Cases of Hong Kong,” in Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2017), pp. 1–18.
  • “Archival Flows: Fragment, Material, and Memory in/through the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum,” in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2017), pp 14–24.
  • “Abandoned Negatives, Themeless Parks: Images of Contemporary China in Two Photographic Projects,” in Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2017), pp 33–50.
  • “Writing at the End of the History: Reflections on Two Cases of Graffiti Writing in Hong Kong,” in Public Art Dialogue, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2014), pp 147–166.
  • “Remembering the Pain of “Others”: Reflections on the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum and Beyond,” in Writing the War in Asia – a Documentary History, An Online Archive founded by University of Essex, University of Hong Kong and University of Konstanz, http://www.warinasia.com/iris-pan-lu, March, 2014.
  • “Who is Occupying Wall and Street: Graffiti and Urban Spatial Politics in Contemporary China,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2014), pp 136–153.
  • "Introduction" and Chapter 5 "The Making of an Aesthetic Counterpublic in 1970s Hong Kong: A Visual Exploration ofThe 70's Biweekly", L.Pan Ed.The 70's Biweekly:Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 2023, pp.1-25 and pp.113-140.
  • "Taipei's National Martyrs' Shrine: The Past and Present Lives of a Difficult Monument", in Huang, Shu-Mei. Hyun Kyung Lee, and Edward Vickers Ed., Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific : Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, pp.64-80.
  • “The Kitschy, the Shanzhai and the Ugly: Creating Architectural Utopia in Contemporary Chinese Cities,” translated by Sasaki Gentaro, in Creative industries in East Asia: Cultural politics, Co-edited by Takeshi Tanikawa, Noriko SUDO and Dixon H.W. Wong, Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2015, pp. 47-74. (〈キッチュ、”山寨”、丑さ──现代中国の都市における建筑ユートピアの创造〉,佐々木玄太郎訳。 「东アジアのクリエイティヴ产业:文化のポリティクス」,谷川建司・须藤遥子・王向华[共編]。東京:森話社,2015,47–74。)
  • Representations of “South of the Sea”: Renegotiating the Place of Hainan Island in Historical and Cultural Imaginations, General Research Fund, Research Grants Council, The Hong Kong SAR Government (Grant received: 01/2023).
  • “From The 70s Bi–weekly to Communiqué: Autonomous Media, Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in Hong Kong 1970s–1990s” General Research Fund, Research Grants Council, The Hong Kong SAR Government (Grant received: 06/2018)
  • “Remapping World War II Memory through Commemorative Artifacts in Contemporary Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan” Early Career Scheme, Research Grants Council, The Hong Kong SAR Government (Grant received: 06/2016)
  • “The New and Art Archives in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan,” University’s Start–up Fund for New Recruits, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Grant received: 04/2016)

 

Other Grants Received

  • “Grant for Translations of German Books into Other Languages,” for translating Boris Groys Über das Neue, Goethe Institute China (11/2016)
  • 08/2019, “The Necessity to be an Alternative: Autonomous Media and Social Activism and in Hong Kong in the 1970s,” Inter–asia Cultural Studies Conference, Silliman University, Dumaguete City, Philippines.
  • 07/2019, “Imagining Imaginarium: National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine in Taipei and beyond,” Asia on the Rise, AAS–in–Asia, Bangkok, Thailand.
  • 06/2019, “Rethinking ways of Accumulation: Methodologies and Practices in Engaging with Art and Visual Archives/Archiving in Contemporary Asia,” International Film Festival Forum, Xiamen University, China.
  • 11/2018, “After 1968, Here Comes The 70s: Autonomous Media, Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in Hong Kong in the 1970s,” The Global Sixties: Transnational Connectivity and Global Consciousness, Shanghai University, China.
  • 04/2018, “Tour of the Orient: Cathay Pacific’s “Contemporary Art in Asia” Exhibitions (1965), 44th Annual Conference & Bookfair, Association for Art History, Courtauld Institute of Art & King’s College London, UK.
  • 07/2017, “Active Archives: Image, Temporality and the Making of the Common in Asia,” 2017 Inter–Asia Cultural Studies CONFERENCE, Songkunghoe University, Seoul, South Korea.
  • 06/2017, “Socially Engaged Archive: Art, Articulation and the Making of the Public in Greater China,” Chinese Digital Media Workshop, Duke Kunshan University, Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, China.
  • “Revisiting Hong Kong’s Youth Resistance in the 1970s: The 70s Bi–Weekly and Beyond,” Irregular Rhythm Asylum, Tokyo, Japan (21 Dec., 2019)
  • “Forgetting The Unforgettable: Monuments and the Changing Spaces of War Memory,” Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Para Site International Conference (10–12 Oct, 2019)
  • Lecture: “Forgetting the unforgettable: monument and the changing spaces of war memory in Greater China,” The Michael Fang Lecture, University of Liverpool (14 May, 2019)
  • “Miasma, Plants and Export Painting: On Spatial and Power Construction in Visual History,” Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Guangzhou, China (14 Dec, 2018)
  • “On the New: Archival Materials, Archive and Artistic Research Methodology,” OCAT Shenzhen, China (21 Oct, 2018)
  • Translated from Boris Groys, Über das Neue. Chongqing: Chongqing University Press, 2018.
  • Translated from Sebastian Veg, “Democratic Modernism: Rethinking the politics of early twentieth century fiction in China and Europe,” in Studies on Modern Chinese Literature, Vol. 6 (2014), pp 1–27.
  • Many Undulating Things (co–directed with Bo Wang, 2019, 125 min)
    • 2020 Int’l Competition, Arkipel – Jakarta Int’l Documentary & Experimental Film Festival, Indonesia
    • 2020 Revelation Perth International Film Festival, Perth, Australia
    • 2020 An Impulse to Turn, Inside–out Art Museum, Beijing
    • 2020 Sundays for Hong Kong, Berliner Festspiele, Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany
    • 2020 Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Thessaloniki, Greece
    • 2019 Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, Hong Kong
    • 2019 Asiatica Film Festival, Rome
    • 2019 fARAD Documentary Film Festival, Arad, Romania
    • 2019 Asian Competition, DMZ Int’l Documentary Film Festival, Goyang, South Korea
    • 2019 Open City Documentary Festival, London
    • 2019 Compétition Internationale Burning Lights, Visions du Réel, Nyon, Switzerland

 

  • Miasma, Plants and Export Paintings (co–directed with Bo Wang, 2017, 28 min)
    • 2020 An Impulse to Turn, Inside–out Art Museum, Beijing
    • 2020 Garden of Six Seasons, Para Site, Hong Kong
    • 2019 DOKUARTS, German Historical Museum/Zeughauskino, Berlin, Germany
    • 2019 Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, Yekaterinburg, Russia
    • 2019 Essay Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK
    • 2019 Unidentified Landscape, Hotel Asia Project 2019, Barrak, Okinawa, Japan
    • 2018 Image Forum Festival, Japan (Winner of Award for Excellence)
    • 2017 Bi–city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzhen/Hong Kong

 

  • Traces of an Invisible City: Three Notes on Hong Kong (co–directed with Bo Wang, 2016, 70 min)
    • 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, South Korea
    • 2019 Essay Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK
    • 2017 Autonomous Cinema, Hong Kong
    • 2017 Tales of Our Time, The Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
    • 2016 Asian Competition, DMZ Int’l Documentary Film Festival, South Korea

 

  • “Ode to Infrastructure” (Multimedia installation)
    • Infrastructural Territory (Exhibition installation), OCAT Shanghai (30 Jun, 2018 – 09 Sep, 2018)
    • “Ode to Infrastructure” (Solo, co–produced), META Gallery, Shanghai, China (22 Oct – 10 Dec, 2016)

Esteem Measures

Journal Editorship

  • Indexer of Chinese-language publications, Foreign Language Index, Society of Contemporary Art Historians, U.S, (since June 2020).
  • Book Review Editor: China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies
  • International advisory board member of Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art
  • International advisory board member of Nuart Journal

Awards and Honors

  • Nomination in competition in film festivals
    • 2020 Int’l Competition, Arkipel – Jakarta Int’l Documentary & Experimental Film Festival, Indonesia
    • 2019 Int’l Competition, Open City Documentary Festival, London, UK
    • 2019 Compétition Internationale Burning Lights, Visions du Réel, Nyon, Switzerland
    • 2016 Asian Competition, DMZ Int’l Documentary Film Festival, South Korea
  • Film Awards
    • Winner of Award for Excellence, 2018 Image Forum Festival, Japan
  • Film Fund Awards
    • 2020 ACC CINEMA FUND, South Korea
    • 2016 Film Grant, Film Market, DMZ Documentary Film Festival, South Korea
The (Im)possibility of Art Archive: Theories and Experience in/from Asia

The (Im)possibility of Art Archive: Theories and Experience in/from Asia. Shanghai and Hong Kong: KCL Publishing and Phantom Archives, 2023.

dr-pan-lu-publication-the-70-s-biweekly

𝙏𝙝𝙚 70'𝙨 𝘽𝙞𝙬𝙚𝙚𝙠𝙡𝙮: 𝙎𝙤𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡 𝘼𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙢 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘼𝙡𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝘾𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙡 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙙𝙪𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙞𝙣 1970𝙨 𝙃𝙤𝙣𝙜 𝙆𝙤𝙣𝙜 . Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 2023.

dr-pan-lu-publication-image-imagination-imaginarium

Image, Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Monuments in Greater China. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. 2021.

dr-pan-lu-publication-in-visible-palimpsest-memory

In–Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai. Bern: Peter Lang, Eurosinica Vol.15, 2016.

dr-pan-lu-publication-aestheticizing-public-space

Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities. Bristol/Chicago:Intellect/U Chicago Press, 2015.

dr-pan-lu-publication-politics-aesthetics-of-creativity

Politics and Aesthetics of Creativity: City, Culture and Space in East Asia, co–edited with Dixon HWWong and Karin Ling–Fung Chau, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, 2015.

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