© Peter Waibel
Ting-Chia Wu is a visual artist and cultural researcher, currently based in Berlin and Vienna. His work examines the politics of images and the meaning production circulating within their material, historical, social, and ecological conditions. Based in media and critical theory, Ting-Chia Wu investigates how the real and the imaginary converge in a hypermediated world through writing, performance, and moving images.
He holds a BA in Fine Arts from the National Taiwan University of Arts, DNSEP (MFA) from École supérieure d'art et design Le Havre-Rouen, and a MA in the Ecology of Arts and Media from the University of Paris VIII. From 2023-25, he served as a research assistant at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft Bonn — Abteilung Digitale Gesellschaft (Digital Society) at the University of Bonn. Currently, he is a research member associated with the Structured Doctoral Program “Performing Matters: Manifold Temporalities” at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
Taiwan Post-Cinematic Affect:
Postcolonial Visibilities in Digital Neoliberalism
Situated in media and postcolonial studies, as well as philosophy of the arts, this project aims to explore how Taiwan’s media productions express the structure of feeling, as Steven Shaviro describes it, “post-cinematic affect,” in an East-Asian context. Post-cinema marks the shift of the cultural dominant: from cinema to television to digital media. According to Shaviro, digital technologies, alongside the neoliberal economy, express the contemporary lived experience; he maps this through post-cinematic works mainly from North America and Western Europe, reflecting a shared neoliberal world: hypermediacy, timeless time, and space of flows. Can this mediation of the world really represent all societies within the neoliberal economic system in the 21st century?
From a postcolonial perspective, such a Western-centric form of visibility is, in fact, a space of confinement, constituted by an excluded outside (Chow). Therefore, this research focuses on Taiwan. Rather than a fixed idea of a nation, I depict Taiwan as such a symbol of the excluded outside and a symptom of entangling temporalities, divergent historicisms, cultural hybridity, and fluid identities. Through media representation, the divergence and convergence of this imaginative community become visible and legible. It is no coincidence that modern colonialism in Taiwan began in parallel with the public appearance of cinema in Paris (1895). Thereafter, cinema accompanies Taiwan’s history and memory through Japanese colonialism, Chinese nationalist autocracy, and American-led neoliberalism up to the present day. This research will, on the one hand, explore how this excluded outside begins to express itself in turn; on the other hand, engage with the transformative potential of the ongoing encounters between the West and the rest of the world in the post-cinematic entanglement of time, image, and affect.