Sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies.
Qinna Shen will present a lecture based on her forthcoming book, “Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion: Chinese-German Culture and Politics through a Feminist Lens.”
Abstract: Jiny Lan, who was born in China in 1970 and moved to Germany in 1995, is a feminist conceptual artist whose politically engaged avant-garde art uniquely fuses Eastern and Western culture. As a diasporic and minority artist, Lan has been able to achieve institutional recognition in Germany. Qinna Shen, author of the soon-to-be-released book Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion: Chinese-German Culture and Politics through a Feminist Lens (Camden House, 2025), has systematically examined Lan’s creation methods and formal characteristics, as well as themes and concepts. Tackling political topics makes Lan the artist she is. In this talk, Shen will focus on selected artworks that approach German and European politics in a visually captivating way. Through message painting that stands in the traditions of Narrative Figuration and Chinese Political Pop, Lan offers pictorial commentaries on major political topics including the Syrian refugee crisis, Brexit, the pandemic, the Russian war in Ukraine, culture wars, and Sino-European relations.
Qinna Shen received her Ph.D. in German from Yale and is Associate Professor and Chair of German at Bryn Mawr College. Her research focuses on 20th-century German culture, visual studies, and Asian German Studies. She is the author of The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films (2015) and Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion: Chinese-German Culture and Politics through a Feminist Lens (2025). She also co-edited two volumes Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia (2014) and Charting Asian German Film History: Imagination, Collaboration, and Diasporic Representation (2025). Her articles have appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals as well as in edited volumes. She is on three editorial boards: German Studies Review, Visual Culture in German Contexts Series, and German Screen Studies. In 2017–20 she served on the German Studies Association (GSA) Program Committee (20th/21st Germanistik). In 2021, she chaired the DAAD/GSA Article Prize Committee. She also chaired the GSA Seminar Committee for the 2023 and 2024 conferences. She is currently co-editing the special issue marking the German Studies Association’s 50th anniversary in 2026. She has been elected to the German Studies Association Executive Board and will start her three-year term on January 1, 2026.
Sourced from the Bryn Mawr College website: https://www.brynmawr.edu/inside/people/qinna-shen
