Cecilia Chuan Jiang
Programme:
Design - MPhil/PhD
Start date:
September 2024
Mode of study:
Full time
Research title:
Animating Cities: Memory, Interaction, and Personal Geographies of Urban Transformation
Biography
Chuan (Cecilia) Jiang is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh whose research examines how animation can mediate memory, migration, and urban transformation in contemporary China and its diasporic extensions.
Blending traditional hand-drawn aesthetics with digital and interactive techniques, her work reimagines the city as a living, responsive surface - a memory capsule where personal and collective histories intertwine.
Chuan’s artistic and curatorial practice often explores the porous boundaries between home and elsewhere, drawing on feminist and migratory perspectives to visualize layered belonging and emotional geographies. Her animated installations and mixed-media works have been exhibited internationally in China, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
She has also directed the visual art design for major film festivals, including the Mint Chinese Film Festival and To See More Vanishing Woman: Glasgow Female Film Festival. Across her projects, Chuan continues to explore how animation can serve as both an artistic language and a research method for re-inhabiting urban space through tenderness, memory, and technological imagination.
Research interests
- Animation and urban space
- Memory, migration, and diaspora in visual culture
- Feminist and post-migratory spatial theory
- Interactive and AI-based animation practice
- Cross-cultural representation in East Asian art and media
- Embodied spectatorship and haptic visuality
Chuan’s research investigates how animation can act as a speculative and affective method for representing urban memory and social change in China and beyond. Her project Portable Cities, through a series of animated city-models and interactive installations based on seven cities she has lived, explores how moving-image art can translate the emotional geographies of migration into spatial form.
Her work combines theory and practice: drawing on scholars such as Miwon Kwon, Giuliana Bruno, Sara Ahmed, and Doreen Massey, while developing site-specific, responsive city models that record and reinterpret viewers’ encounters. By integrating feminist theory, digital imaging, and audience-based documentation, Chuan’s research redefines animation as both a method and a medium for studying urban life, belonging, and the boundaries between physical and imagined cities.