PAN Lu is Associate Professor at Department of Chinese History and Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Pan is author of three monographs: In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities (Bristol: Intellect, 2015), and her new book Image, Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Monuments in Greater China is published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. She is chief editor of The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong (Hong Kong: HKU Press, 2023) and The (Im)possibilities of Art Archives: Theories and Experience in/from Asia (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
Reframing the Island: Colonial Lenses, Imperialist Nostalgia, and the Photographic Construction of Hainan
Between 1928 and 1938, the documentary imagery of Hainan Island emerged as a contested field of visual representation characterized by a collision of cross-cultural gazes. Exploring early photography produced by Chinese Republican officials, Western anthropologists, and Japanese commercial associations, this presentation examines how the photographic medium served as an instrument of colonial knowledge, political propaganda, and nationalist development. Central to this talk is the dialectical tension between the photographer’s intended narrative, or studium, and the disruptive, unintended details, or punctum, that subvert it. The presentation analyzes three distinct archives. First, it explores the 1928 travel imagery of Chinese official Huang Qiang, whose idealized vision of infrastructural progress was inadvertently undermined by photographs exposing the vast indigenous labor required for his expedition. Next, it investigates the anthropological portraiture of German scholar Hans Stübel (1931–1932); while intended as a scientific catalog of the Li people, his archive is pierced by “non-compliant” subjects whose smiles and retaliatory gazes disrupt the colonial framework. Finally, it examines anonymous Japanese occupation photography that weaponized the vitality and smiles of local women to project a feminized, tranquil vision of colonial order. Applying Nicolas Mirzoeff’s concept of “countervisuality,” this talk argues against viewing Hainan’s indigenous inhabitants as passive objects of surveillance. Instead, these visual fractures expose the paradoxes within imperial projects, foregrounding the island’s capacity to “gaze back” and construct an alternative realism.