Research Overview

This project adopts diffraction as a core methodological strategy to explore the generative relationship between classical Chinese poetics and contemporary photographic practice. Rather than using one theoretical system to validate another, diffraction serves as a way to activate resonance across multiple dimensions at the intersection of thought and practice:

To bring the concepts of Qi (vital force) and Yixiang (poetic imagery) from classical Chinese poetry into generative encounter with the material agency of new materialist thought;

To allow poetic language and photographic materiality to diffract through one another within images, forming complex structures of perception;

To trace how text, media, and natural landscapes converge visually to form diffractive patterns of thought and sensory pathways.

Within this process, I introduce the conceptual lenses of entanglement and topological configuration. Yijing (artistic atmosphere) is not understood as a fixed expression, but as an emergent network of relations—among photography, poetics, bodily perception, and material nature. These elements are not separate, but exist in a state of ongoing generative entanglement.

Photographic practice becomes a topological operation, wherein emotion, time, light, and space fold, twist, and unfold. This topological generativity reconfigures our understanding of Yijing—no longer as a purely literary abstraction, but as a dynamic perceptual field that emerges through material and mediated interactions.

Rather than seeking analogy between Yijing and photography, this project focuses on their intra-active material relations—how they operate and transform one another. Drawing on Karen Barad’s theories of diffraction and agential cuts, I approach poetry and photography as a generative entangled system, where images both carry and create poetic atmosphere, producing a visual space that is fluid, embodied, and topologically sensed.