This presentation examines how contemporary Chinese artists transform the traditional handscroll format into a site of remediation within global art institutions. It analyzes specific works: Wang Qingsong’s The Night Revels of Lao Li (2000) transforms the handscroll into a monumental public spectacle, subverting its private viewing ritual. Hong Lei’s vitrine-displayed scroll, I dreamt of being killed by my father…(2000), fuses Daoist symbolism with psychoanalysis to process memory. Chen Chieh-jen’s mechanized Star Chart (2017) employs automated scrolling to critique capitalist discipline and technological surveillance. Drawing on media theory’s concept of remediation, I argue that these practices not only revive the handscroll’s narrative temporality but also expose the tensions between Chinese aesthetic traditions and Western institutional frameworks. By turning the handscroll into a site of cross-cultural translation, these artists reveal how visual media negotiate between tradition and modernity, intimacy and spectacle, and local and global systems of meaning. This project illuminates how Chinese contemporary art challenges Western-centric paradigms and offers new ways to understand cultural exchange and representation in an age of global visual circulation.

About the speaker: Kexin Lyu is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on contemporary Chinese photography in post-2000 art. Before joining Pitt, she earned her MFA in Photography from Tsinghua University and her BA in Art History from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.