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Supervised by Dr. Wenny Teo

Funded by��AHRC/CHASE

PhD Thesis

My thesis examines contemporary art in China and the broader Sinophone world through infrastructure as an aesthetic, political, and epistemological lens. It argues that infrastructure is not merely a technical background to modernisation, but a visual-political formation that shapes perception, organises subjectivity, and mediates relations between human bodies, state power, technological systems, and historical imagination.

The central research question asks how infrastructure becomes visible in art as a medium through which the promises and contradictions of modernity are produced, sustained, fractured, and contested. Rather than treating infrastructure as a theme, the thesis conceptualises it as a relational structure—an “infrastructural promise”—that binds collective will, bodily labour, environmental transformation, and imagined futures. Methodologically, the project combines infrastructure studies, philosophy of technology, and art-historical visual analysis. It develops a spectrum of “infrastructural consciousness” to assess how artworks render infrastructure perceptible, and uses close readings of artworks, films, and visual archives to examine how infrastructure operates through form, affect, and visual rhetoric.

By repositioning infrastructure as a critical framework within art history and visual culture, the thesis contributes to debates on Chinese heterogeneous modernity and demonstrates how contemporary art reveals infrastructure as both material system and cultural form, entangling state power, technological development, and lived experience beyond dominant Western paradigms.