Personal Statement

My understanding of how realism operates in animation underwent a marked shift during my graduate training and early professional practice. Prior to my MA at Central Saint Martins, I understood animation primarily through its technical and performative aspects, chasing emotion frame by frame, and refining character movement to make a story plausible. During my MA, however, I came to recognize that these techniques operate within broader cultural and aesthetic structures that shape how animated worlds are perceived and how meaning is produced. One pivotal moment in this shift occurred in the “Reflect on Reality” unit, in which I adapted a Creative Writing peer’s monologue, Michelin Dining, into an animation. The piece drew on writer’s childhood memories of playing house, involving culturally specific costumes unfamiliar to me. When attempting to visualize these elements, I found that my habitual drawing approaches failed to convey their symbolic roles within the writer’s cultural background. Researching their connotations and negotiating their visual form with the writer revealed that visual elements in animation are interpreted through culturally specific conventions—subtle expectations that shape what appears appropriate or credible within a given context. My later experiments reinforced this point: certain styles, such as ink-wash, while expressive in other contexts, sat uneasily with a monologue rooted in Western childhood play. These experiences marked the beginning of my intellectual engagement with the culturally variable nature of animated realism, suggesting that what feels “authentic” or “credible” in animation emerges through culturally shaped aesthetic choices, rather than residing inherently within them. This insight later informed my research interest in animated realism and cultural authenticity within the Chinese rural context.

In responding to these emerging questions, my academic training and professional experience have equipped me with the analytical and practical skills necessary for research in animation. As a long-time practitioner, I have developed substantial production experience across independent, institutional, and commercial contexts. This includes directing the official trailer for the London International Animation Festival 2023, illustrating the published children’s book Fledgling, and contributing as a 2D animation assistant on a 16-minute film produced by Passion Pictures in London. Working across these projects within international production teams sharpened not only my professional production skills, but also my capacity for cross-cultural communication and project coordination.

Beyond hands-on production, a particularly formative analytical experience was my internship at Story Critters, an animation consultancy based in New York. Unlike my previous production-focused roles, this position required a more reflective and analytical approach. The company provides consultancy services for global clients, offering plot and design feedback to ensure cultural accessibility and market viability across different regions. Participating in client meetings and brainstorming sessions brought into view the underlying negotiations between creative intention, audience expectation, and industrial constraint. Through this experience, I developed the ability to analyze animation not only as a creative outcome, but as a process shaped by cultural, economic, and institutional factors.

Building on these academic and professional experiences, I have come to recognize the need for systematic doctoral training to critically examine animated realism within contemporary Chinese animation. Growing up in mainland China during a period of rapid cultural and industrial transformation, I witnessed the evolution of Chinese animation while experiencing the influence of Japanese anime and the global dominance of Disney aesthetics as well. In this transnational media environment, Miyazaki’s films rarely assert overt “Japaneseness,” yet their philosophical values and cultural worldview remain distinctly legible. Disney’s “life-plus” realism has similarly become a globally standardized visual language. By contrast, the aesthetic and cultural logic of contemporary Chinese animation appears increasingly difficult to articulate, particularly following its shift from a collective “fine-art” tradition toward diversified industrial production. Scholarly discussions of animated realism in the Chinese context remain limited, while commercial animation often exhibits a tendency toward homogenized Western realist aesthetics. These conditions point to the need for critical frameworks capable of examining how realism, stylization, and cultural specificity are negotiated within Chinese animation today. This recognition has shaped the direction of my proposed research project, Beyond Precision: Reclaiming Cultural Fidelity through Non-Realist Animation in Chinese Rural Narratives, which examines how non-realist animation can function as a culturally situated mode of realism in articulating rural experience.

Situated at the intersection of cultural studies and animation studies, my research requires an academic environment that integrates theoretical inquiry with practice-based experimentation. ADM offers an intellectual ecology that is uniquely aligned with this aim. Positioned within the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CoHASS), ADM opens up possibilities for engaging animation practice with media anthropology, Asian cultural studies, and critical visual analysis. Its emphasis on concept-driven art-making, rather than technology-led production, also closely aligns with my research stance, which challenges the assumption that progress in contemporary animation is defined primarily by technical advancement and industrial standardization. Furthermore, ADM’s faculty expertise across animation practice, media theory, and professional production provides a rich teaching and research context in which creative work can be approached as both a cultural and a practical inquiry.

Within this framework, my project seeks to contribute a distinct regional and cultural perspective to ADM’s strengths in animation studies. By approaching Chinese animation not as a derivative of Western models but as a site of culturally grounded theory-building, I aim to enrich ADM’s engagement with Asian animation research, particularly through attention to rural lifeworlds as historically embedded modes of experience. Through practice-informed analysis and culturally specific case studies, I hope to strengthen ADM’s role as a critical hub for Asian animation scholarship.

In the longer term, my goal is to establish myself as a scholar whose work bridges animation practice and critical research across cultural contexts, with a sustained focus on Chinese animation. I aim to expand global understandings of Chinese animation beyond hegemonic Hollywood-centered theoretical models, by centering it as a vital site for critical and theoretical inquiry. Doctoral training at ADM represents a formative stage in my development, offering the intellectual, pedagogical, and research foundations necessary for sustained scholarly engagement in animation studies. I therefore hope to pursue my doctoral training at ADM as the next stage of this long-term research agenda.