Feixuan Xu is a London-based anthropologist and writer. Feixuan’s research addresses art, multispecies ethnography and ecocriticism. She obtained a PhD in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong (2022), where her thesis analysed the Daoist notion of ziran in Liang Shaoji’s collaborations with silkworms, farmers and biologists. Feixuan examines labour, sensory knowledge and situated ethics in multispecies art, has edited educational materials for the Shanghai Museum and publishes in journals on multispecies studies. She previously received a Fulbright Research Scholar Award (2019-20) at New York University and holds an MA in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Durham University.
Feixuan Xu was the 2022 Asymmetry Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese and Sinophone Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Tian Jiayi is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Within the realms of cultural sociology and the sociology of the arts, his research seeks to understand the meaning of creativity for self-taught artists in contemporary China and how it shapes their artmaking. He is also interested in artists’ identity, cultural governance, and the cultural change in modern and contemporary China. He now serves as the PhD representative at the Sociology of the Arts Study Group of BSA. His first peer-reviewed article appeared on Cultural Sociology, which discussed the identity transformation of Dafen painters.
Kiki Tianqi Yu is a filmmaker, scholar, and film curator. She is Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London. Her research, in theory and by practice, explores cinema and moving image art in relation to decoloniality, personal expressions, eastern philosophies, with a focus on creative documentary, women’s cinema and Sinophone cinema. Her books include 'My' Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China (2019), China’s iGeneration (2014). Kiki’s award-winning films include Photographing Shenzhen (2006), Memory of Home (2009), China’s van Goghs (2016), and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019), shown at IDFA, Vision du Reel, Thessaloniki, Helsinki DocPoint, the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, BFI, V&A, etc. Her curatorial projects include ‘Polyphonic China: Chinese independent documentary’ (London 2009), ‘Memory Talks: Personal Cinema’ (Shanghai 2017), ‘The Spirit of Mountains and Water: Gao Shiqiang’s moving image art’(2023), and ‘Dancing With Water: Women’s cinema from contemporary China’ (2024).