My research concerns the visual and material culture of modern China, with a particular focus on photography, popular and industrial printing, collecting practices, and the circulation of images and objects across institutional and national boundaries.
A central strand of my work examines Chinese popular prints (nianhua) from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am interested not only in their iconography and use, but also in the infrastructures that made them possible: workshops, printing firms, commercial networks, collectors, museums, and systems of classification. Recent work has focused especially on the large collection of Chinese popular prints at the Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK) in Hamburg and on the transnational ethnological and folkloristic networks through which these objects entered European collections.
A second long-standing field of research is the history of photography in modern China. My doctoral work examined photographic communication in the People’s Republic of China between the 1940s and early 1980s, and I continue to work on photography as a medium situated between image production, political communication, material practice, and everyday visual culture.
More broadly, I am interested in the history of visual knowledge: how images are made, circulated, collected, reproduced, classified, displayed, and interpreted. This includes questions of media history, museum and collection history, histories of technology, and the relationship between industrial production and visual culture.
My work often combines object-based research with archival sources and close attention to material and technical processes. Current and future projects continue to explore the production and institutional history of modern Chinese printing, particularly in Republican-era Shanghai.
For publications, see the Publications page. Research materials, bibliographies, and other working resources are collected under Resources.