This panel engages a growing body of scholarship that has shifted attention from content and ideology to questions of mediation, materiality, and form. While studies of modernity in East Asia have often emphasized intellectual history, political discourse, or literary representation, this panel builds on and contributes to recent work in media studies, visual culture, and book history that foregrounds the role of formal practices in shaping experience. At the same time, it extends this scholarship by bringing together multiple media within a single analytical frame, highlighting how distinct formal strategies across print, film, and visual art function as interconnected modes of mediation across and within East Asia.
One paper by Yang Yang examines translations in the Chinese women’s magazine The Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi) in the 1920s, focusing on writings by the Japanese feminist Yamakawa Kikue. It approaches translation not simply as the transfer of ideas but as an editorially and materially mediated practice embedded in the periodical form. By foregrounding paratextual framing, visual representation, textual selection, and the material organization of the magazine—including layout, distribution, and the serial arrangement of texts across issues—the paper shows how feminist ideas are actively reshaped as they are made legible within the conditions of the periodical press.
A second paper by Jingyang Lu explores montage in 1930s Chinese left-wing literature and film as a cross-media formal practice that mediates the fragmented experience of urban modernity. Bringing together literary texts and films, it demonstrates how montage juxtaposes heterogeneous scenes to render visible the fragmentation and social divisions of modern city life. By organizing perception through discontinuity and contrast, montage enables new forms of social critique while shaping how modern experience becomes meaningful.
A third paper by Sun Yang Park investigates early abstraction in the work of Korean artist Yoo Youngkuk, produced in Japan in the late 1930s and early 1940s, situating it within colonial modernity and the prewar Japanese avant-garde. Focusing on visual art, including painting, surrealist organic abstractions, and experimental reliefs exhibited in independent venues, it shows how Yoo’s abstraction unfolds as an ongoing and processual practice rather than a fixed modernist language. By foregrounding pictorial structure, material process, and exhibition context, the paper demonstrates how modern experience is mediated through transnational circulation and institutional constraint.
The panel also includes a paper by Luzhi Xu on the fiction of Korean writer Park Tae-won, a colonial intellectual educated in Japan. It examines how his narrative perspective and the gendered gaze function as formal strategies that mediate colonial urban experience. Focusing on “Tokyo-Gyeongseong texts,” it shows how literary perspective structures the perception of modern life while reproducing and unsettling colonial and gendered hierarchies. In doing so, the paper highlights how narrative form participates in shaping and responding to the tensions and contradictions of modernity in colonial Korea.
The session will be organized into four presentations of approximately 12–13 minutes each, followed by 20–25 minutes of open discussion. This format ensures sufficient time for audience engagement while maintaining a balanced and focused set of presentations. By allowing extended discussion, the session encourages dialogue across disciplinary and regional perspectives, fostering conversation on shared methodological concerns.
The panel brings together early-career scholars from diverse institutional and disciplinary backgrounds, working across literature, translation studies, media studies, and art history, and engaging materials from China, Korea, and Japan. This combination of regional and disciplinary perspectives supports the panel’s cross-media and comparative framework while fostering dialogue across different methodological approaches.