Weixian Pan

Weixian Pan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. She holds a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University, Montreal. 

Prior to joining Queen’s University, she was Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai and affiliated faculty in the Center for Global Asia. She also taught at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and worked as the coordinator and researcher in the Global Emergent Media Lab. 

Her research interests center on politics of visuality (including cinema, television, video, and other new media/art forms), critical media infrastructure, and environmental media. She examines these textual, material, and socio-political dynamics mainly through the situated experience of China but gradually expanding to explore the trans-regional linkages across Asia and the Global South. 

Her work appeared in peer-review journals such as Asiascape: Digital Asia, Culture Machine, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Journal of Environmental Media. In the past, she has led curatorial projects such as “Elemental Relations: Thinking Ecologically through Artist Film and Video” (2021) and “China Now: Independent Visions” (2016). Her current book project Frontier Vision: The Geopolitics of Seeing China’s Borderlands, examines how China’s geopolitical aspirations have been hyper-mediated and entangled with the logic of frontier-making, between the mid-twentieth century and the present day. This book offers a transhistorical view of the visual regimes that recalibrates natural environments and their political promises through geological extraction, televisual mediation of hydropower and maritime signal sovereignty. 

She is currently working on a collaborative video project on the hydraulic and infrastructural landscapes along the Pearl River in Southern China. Her next research aims to theorize the transboundary linkages of Asia through different forms of aquatic mediation, such as vernacular imagination of water and the emerging blue carbon economy.