Kiki Tianqi Yu
Filmmaker, Teacher, and Writer in UK
Kiki is Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London. She is committed to advancing global film and moving image theory and research-led practice. Her received international recognition and praise through awards, invited keynotes and talks.
Kiki’s research, through writing, filmmaking and curation, include three strands:
The first area is cinema and moving images through eastern philosophies. Kiki is currently working on her “Daoism and Cinema” project. Situating global cinema and artists’ moving images within contemporary debates of Daoist philosophy, political ecology, East Asian art history and decoloniality, this project aims to build a new theoretical framework to understand cinema and film practice through Daoist correlative and transformative cosmology. Intervening the western centred posthumanist theorisation of cinema and culture, and critically engaging with Chinese schools of thought, it seeks to reformulate what cinema is and what cinema can do through a Daoist cosmological approach, shedding new lights on how to reconceive humans’ relationship with cinema, and how to make sense of the existence of things through cinema.
The second area is documentary image and nonfiction film, especially on personal documentary, essay film, amateur cinema, production culture and sustainable filmmaking. Her books include ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the 21 Century (Bloomsbury 2014) and the special issue of Studies in Documentary Film “Feminist Approaches in Women’s First Person Documentaries from East Asia” (2020 14:1).
The third area is women’s cinema and localised feminism, artists moving image, and independent cinema culture, with a focus on China and Asia at large (East, South, Southeast, Central and West Asia).