Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Illustration
First Advisor
Susan Doyle
Second Advisor
Falaks Vasa
Third Advisor
Jamie Uretsky
Abstract
Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene and Édouard Glissant’s right to opacity, Tùn-Scene combines Chinese mythological narrative, personal memory, and posthuman imagination to propose a resistant mode of visual and narrative relation. The project rejects transparent autobiographical legibility in favor of opacity, affect, and embodied experience as strategies against comparative racialization and reductive interpretation. At the same time, the thesis adopts surrealist eco-feminism as a critical lens through which to interpret the work’s use of myth, nonhuman life, irrational juxtaposition, and sensory disorientation, while distinguishing its method from the misogynistic legacy of canonical Surrealism. The author’s video installation My Body, a Four-Winged Bear (2026) serves as the central case study, through which the thesis reflects on how interdisciplinary illustration can operate across installation, moving image, sound, and speculative narrative as a critical practice of resistance.
Recommended Citation
Du, Minglu, "Tùn-Scene and A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, and Posthuman Imagination" (2026). Masters Theses. 1623.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1623
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