Shengyu Wang

Research question: In what ways does 19th-century Shanghai - the birthplace of a Chinese visual modernity - lend historical insights to the studies of virtual reality in our age?

As we experience ever greater integration between reality and cyberspace in the digital age, it is important that we look back and examine how key concepts of digital “virtuality” evolved from historical media environments with comparable traits. This research project focuses on a great variety of “marvelous realms” produced by the vibrant culture industries of Shanghai in the late 19th century; what these realms have in common is that they are all technology-mediated and can be experienced “as if” real.

Through the study of these diverse secondary worlds, Shengyu Wang seeks to give an account of how a new immersive aesthetic emerged in late 19th-century Shanghai, against the twin backdrops of the global dissemination of technologized means of reproduction and the rapid growth of urban entertainment in China. Examining texts and artifacts of diverse mediums while situating them into a larger field of culture production, this study highlights the crucial roles that technological mediation plays in the imagination of boundary-crossing between real life and immersive secondary worlds in late 19th-century Shanghai.