Chenru Xue profile picture
Chenru
Xue
Doctoral Researcher, Degree Programme in Digital Culture, Landscape and Cultural Heritage
PhD Candidate
Space, Land and Territory: The Ideological Construction in Cinematic Circumpolar Landscape

Areas of expertise

Visual Culture
Landscape Studies
Digital media

Biography


My academic background is diverse. I grew up in Chinese cultural context and had a strong passion for traditional painting. I have studied the skills of ink-wash landscape painting, and I am familiar with the Eastern ways of seeing and its distinctive artistic expressions. My major at undergraduate level was film production. After that, I completed my MA in Visual Culture in Lund University, Sweden. My Master’s thesis Pained Body, Performed Madness: A study of the bio-political philosophy in He Yunchang’s performance art investigated the representation of bio-political micro- power and identity through performance artworks.

Meanwhile, I am an independent filmmaker, and my short film was screened in the Short Film Corner of the 70th Festival de Cannes. During my study in Lund University, I did research on environment, animal and landscape aesthetics, and gave speech at the conference Visual Culture: Environment and Nature. These experiences have shaped my interests and abilities in this research. I will go deeper into visual interpretation and content analysis through the dimensions of film study, cultural geography and visual culture.

Teaching

Eastern art; Chinese paintings; landscape in digital era

Research

My research is proposed to examine the role of landscape in the construction of imperialist narratives of the Arctic through circumpolar cinema, to investigate the diversities in representations of both urban and marginal space in the Arctic. Film provides a virtual environment with representational imagery from the ‘real’ world, while the images are selectively depicted, during which process the imperialist ideologies – the cultural and social identities, ethnical epistemology, national and political consensus – could be decoded through landscape.