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Dr Kiki Tianqi Yu

Kiki

Reader in Cinematic Art

Email: kiki.yu@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: ArtsOne G.25C
Website: https://qmul.academia.edu/KikiTianqiYu

Profile

Kiki Tianqi Yu is writer, filmmaker, curator, and Reader in Cinematic Art at the Department of Film Studies and Centre for Film and Ethics in the School of Arts. Her research, in theory and practice, explores cinema in relation to Asian philosophies, art histories, personal expression, and decolonisation, with a focus on creative documentary, essay film, artists moving image, women’s cinema, and Sinophone cinema.  

Her project “Daoism, Cinema and Wellbeing: Meditative Cinema” (2025-2029) (https://www.daoismandcinema.com )received UKRI AHRC Catalyst Award. This project shifts the debates on ecology, cinema and wellbeing through the lens of Daoist philosophy, decolonizing Western-centric paradigms in film theory and philosophy.  

She is writing her second monograph Cinema that Breathes: Daoist Film Philosophy and Meditative Cinema, which systematically engages Daoism with cinema to renew our understanding of film (me)ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics. It also brings a Daoist film philosophy to reshape how we perceive human and more-than-human relationship, and the wellbeing of all.  

Through this project, she established CAVe - Cinema, Asian Philosophies and Visual Ecologies, an interdisciplinary research hub based in QMUL’s School of the Arts that advances cinema and visual art through Asian philosophies to cultivate new ways of seeing, sensing, and relating to the world. 

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 feminist approaches in 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). She has published widely in journals including Screen, Studies in Documentary Film, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Moving Image Review and Art Journal, and numerous edited collections.  

Kiki’s award-winning films include personal essay film Memory of Home (2009) and feature documentaries China’s Van Goghs (co-directed with Haibo Yu, 2016), rethinking the value of copy in the context of labour politics and globalised art trade. Also as the producer of China’s Van Goghs, she raised funding from IDFA Bertha fund, Denmark International Support, Dutch Film Fund, Shenzhen Cultural Fund, CBC, DR, etc. The film won 8 awards and was theatrically released in France, Japan, Hong Kong and Italy, and received very positive reviews in the Hollywood Reporter, Artnet, de Volkstrant, VPRO, etc.  

Kiki also produced Jia Yuchuan’s 17 years’ production Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019), premiered at IDFA 2019, and won the best Audience’s award at Royal Anthropology Institution Film Festival 2021. Through Jia’s intimate personal lens, the film traces the life of a transgender Chinese migrant worker in 15 years’ time.  

These films have been widely screened at international film festivals and art institutions, and collected by Yale University, Harvard University, Columbia University, and so on. Her work-in-progress nonfiction film as part of the AHRC funded project, experiments with qi as a connective, energetic, embodied and multi-sensorial force in rethinking matrilineal kinship.  

Her curatorial projects include Polyphonic China: Chinese independent documentary (London 2009), New Generation Chinese Cinema (London 20210), Memory Talks: Personal Cinema (Shanghai 2017), The Spirit of Mountains and Water: Gao Shiqiang’s Moving Image Art through Cosmological Thinking at BLOC (London 2023).  

In 2024, together with Tong Shan, she curated the film season Dancing with Water: Women’s cinema from contemporary China (www.dancingwithwaterfilm.com ) supported by Centre for Public Engagement Large Grant, showcasing 15 features and 9 shorts by mostly PRC women filmmakers at London’s Bertha DocHouse, the Garden Cinema, and BLOC. 

Kiki has been invited for keynotes, talks and masterclasses at various conferences and institutions, including keynote at European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) annual conference 2018, Chloe Zhao symposium, and talks at BFI, V&A, Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai, OCAT Institute Being, Open City Film Festival, etc. She also regularly gives introductions to films at cinemas and writes for wider readership. For more of her work please visit www.kikitianqiyu.com   

Teaching

She is the Programme Lead for MA Creative Art and Media.  

The modules she has taught at QM include: 

  • Decolonising Approaches to Film Analysis  
  • Making Media 
  • Creative Documentary 
  • Cinema and Eastern Philosophies                                                                                           
  • Cinema and Digital Visual Culture in Contemporary China 
  • Visual essay 

Research

Research Interests:

  • Artist’ moving image  
  • Cinema through Asian philosophies 
  • Chinese cinema and visual art 
  • Daoism and Cinema  
  • Diasporic Chinese filmmakers 
  • Documentary theory and practice, including first person documentary, amateur cinema, ethics of documentary filmmaking 
  • East Asian Cinema and screen culture 
  • Essay film 
  • Feminist filmmaking 
  • Film philosophy 
  • Meditative cinema  
  • Non-western film theory and film philosophy 
  • Personal cinema 
  • Practice-based research 
  • Sinophone cinemas  
  • Somatic filmmaking 
  • Sustainable filmmaking 
  • Women’s cinema  

She is the PI of AHRC funded project “Daoism, Cinema and Wellbeing: Meditative Cinema” (2025-2029), the founder of CAVe - Cinema, Asian Philosophies and Visual Ecologies, an interdisciplinary research hub that advances cinema and visual art through Asian philosophies to cultivate new ways of seeing, sensing, and relating to the world. 

She is also a founding co-convener of BAFTSS East Asian Screen Cultures Special Interest Group. 

Publications

Books:

Book:

  • Sinophone Women’s Cinema and Women Filmmakers, co-edited with Tze-lan Sang, Edinburgh University Press) forthcoming  
  • Essay filmmaking and Narrative Techniques (co-edited with Ronama Turina), Intellect, 2025
  • Special Issue of Studies in Documentary Film: “Women's First Person Documentary Practices from East Asia: Some local Feminist Approaches”, co-edited with Alisa Lebow, March. 2020
  • ‘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 21st Century, co-edited with Matthew Johnson, Keith Wagner, Luke Vulpiani, Bloomsbury, 2014

Journal articles, book chapters, and reviews:

  • Editor’s “Introduction”, in Special Issue “Women's First Person Documentary Practices from East Asia”, Studies in Documentary Film, 2020
  • "In conversation with Wen Hui", in Special Issue “Women's First Person Documentary Practices from East Asia”, Studies in Documentary Film, 2020
  • “First Person Expression on ‘non-western’ Screens  - a case on China” in Creative Practice edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska, Edinburgh University Press, 2020
  • “Image-Writing: The Essayistic/Sanwen in Chinese Nonfiction Cinema and Zhao Liang’s Behemoth (2015) ”, in World Cinema and the Essay Film, edited by Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstic, Edinburgh University Press, 2019
  • “Documentary”, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Vol.10: 1, 2016
  • Co-written with A. T. McKenna. ‘Internationalising Memory: Traumatic Histories and the PRC's Quest to Win an Oscar', in Chinese Cinemas: International Perspectives, edited by Felicia Chan and Andy Willis, Routledge, 2016
  • “Camera Activism in Contemporary People's Republic of China: Provocative Documentation, First Person Confrontation, and Collective Force in Ai Weiwei's Lao Ma Ti Hua”, Studies in Documentary Film, Vol.9:1, 2015
  • “Chinese Photography & Surrealism - Walking at the Extreme Edge of Rationality” in Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Vol. 2:1, 2015
  • “Going Global – Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival 2013”, Studies in Documentary Film, Vol. 8:1, 2014
  • “An Inward Gaze at Home: Amateur Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary China” In Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, edited by Monahan Barry, Laura Rascaroli and Gwenda Young, Bloomsbury, 2014
  • “Towards a Communicative Practice: First Person Filmmaking in Twenty-first century China.” In China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for Twenty-first Century, edited by Johnson et al., Bloomsbury, 2014

Co-written with Keith Wagner: ‘Introduction: China’s iGeneration Cinema: Dispersion, Individualization and Post WTO Moving Image Practices.’ In China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for Twenty-first Century, edited by Johnson et al., Bloomsbury, 2014

 

Supervision

Current PhD Supervision:

Srikrupa Vedal: My body feels with me: Exploring embodied trauma on women's bodies through participatory filmmaking (Co-supervised with Dr Libby Saxton)

Wanzhou Xiao: Cinema is metaphor: The use of audio-visual film critism to explore metaphors in contemporary American cinema (Co-supervised with Dr Guy Westwell)

Iris Yunke Li: Psychogeography in Post-millennial Chinese Cinematic Cities (Co-supervised with Janet Harbord)

Yue Liu: Contemporary women's cinema in China: cinematic practices of Chinese women filmmakers in a complex local socio-spatial landscape (Co-supervised with Lucy Bolton)

Xiaoxin Cheng: Between Worlds: Exploring Family Dynamics and Cultural Identity in British Chinese Cinema (Co-supervised with Grazia Ingravalle)

Yuehan Liu: Exploring the representations of space in Asian slow cinema (Co-supervised with Dr Anat Pick and Ashvin Devasundaram)

Kiki would not be able to review any PhD proposal for 2025 entry.

 

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