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 writer, filmmaker, and curator. She is Reader in Cinematic Art in the Department of Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, where she set up the Research Hub for Cinema, Asian Philosophies and Visual Ecologies (CAVe). Her current project, ‘Daoism, Cinema and Wellbeing: Meditative Cinema’, received an AHRC Catalyst Award. Her books include, as the author, ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China (Edinburgh University Press, 2019); as the co-editor, China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2014), the Special Issue of Studies in Documentary Film on East Asian Women’s personal cinema (14:1 2020), Essay Film and Narrative Techniques (Intellect, 2025), and the forthcoming Sinophone Women’s Cinema and Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh University Press, 2027). Kiki’s award-winning films, including Memory of Home (2009), China’s Van Goghs (2016), and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019), have been widely screened at international film festivals and art institutions. Her curatorial practices include Spirit of Mountains and Water: Cosmological thinking is Gao Shiqiang’s moving image art, and Dancing with Water: Women’s Cinema from Contemporary China film season.