Guest: Professor Youngmin Kim on intermedial ecocriticism and Shuiping Zou on Jiangxi Modern Art

This week we are visited by Professor Youngmin Kim and Shuiping Zou who will share the seminar.

About the seminar

Professor Youngmin Kim, “Understanding the Feedback Loops of Intermedial Ecocriticism Represented by The Sargasso Sea and the Eel Question: Question Concerning Climate Change and Ecocritical Crisis in Critical Representations across Media”

We live in the age of precarity coming from outside, where climate change and ecological crises are intricately intertwined with the pandemic era, compelling us to confront the reality of the Anthropocene from within. Consequently, humans have reached Sustainable Development Goal no. 13 (SDG 13), and the need to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts” as defined by the United Nations should be felt. This task will endeavor to make a social contribution to raising awareness of “education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity building on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning” as outlined in UN Sustainable Development Subgoal 13.3. Although a variety of media are used for communication, understanding of how the diversity of different media can enhance communication is still limited. In response to 13.3, however, the most important objective is to compare how different media convey climate-related scientific facts from a humanities perspective, as  well as how the scientific research results on climate change and ecological crisis can be transferred and transformed via transmediation and media representation.

The Sargasso Sea is an intriguing case because it has produced the space of intermediality in which diverse and converging images, texts, and narratives about the ecosystem, trade route, and refuse disposal site are transformed and represented. On the other hand, it represents high seas, progressively demonstrating that it becomes a temporary and perishable systemic entity stuck in a perpetual contradictory state of crisis, destroying its conditions of possibility, materializing the tales of the Anthropocene and climate change. This presentation will examine the Sargasso Sea and, in particular, the eel question through the analysis of various media types that convey the ecological crisis and climate change that affects the public.

Bio

Youngmin Kim is currently Visiting Professor at The Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies / Department of Film and Literature, Linnaeus University, Sweden; Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature & Director of Trans Media World Literature/Digital Humanities LAB at Dongguk University, Seoul, Korea; and Chair Professor at College of International Education, Hangzhou Normal University, China. His current book project, “Database and World Literature,” takes up Digital Humanities and Trans Media to explore the potential methodology in the field of world literature, poetry, digital humanities, transmedia and intermedia. For the past decade, he has been the principal investigator of numerous projects of National Research Foundation of Korea on cultural translation, aesthetics and ethics of the convergence of world literature, trans media, digital humanities; and humanities in technology.

Email: youngmin.kim.extern@lnu.se, youngm@dongguk.edu, youngm@hznu.edu.cn

Shuiping Zou, "Curatorial Practice of Chinese Modernity Represented by Jiangxi Modern Art in the Process of Unfinished Chinese Modernization"

My project is to investigate the development and current situation of Jiangxi's modern art ecology and cross-media research from the two dimensions of diachronic and synchronic mainly through two series of exhibitions. Taking place between local Jiangxi artists, domestic and international artists, the dialogue revolves around the artistic modernity of China's unfinished modernization process, and discusses Jiangxi as a microcosm of typical China and its modern art surrounded by traditional Chinese culture and globalization generation and status.

Bio

Shuiping Zou is is a senior lecturer from Nanchang University, China, working on the early cinema andnovel narratology. Her interest in interart research has led her to work concurrently as an independent curator since 2017 with the pen-name Xiaoshang. Her current project is working on issues of Jiangxi Modern Art in contemporary China.

How to participate

It is possible to attend the seminar both from Dacke in Växjö and via zoom. Contact us at ims@lnu.se if you want to participate via zoom, or sign up for our external email list to receive automatic updates on our events (zoom link and additional information are sent out one week in advance).

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen