Campus Directory

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit History of Art/Visual Culture

Title PhD candidate

Graduate Major Visual Studies

Affiliation Graduate

Web Site

Primary Office Location Kresge College Academic Building

Mail Stop Porter Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

Evelyn graduated from University College London (UCL) with a B.A. in History and M.A. in History of Art, having specialized in modern French and Russian history and global contemporary art. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Visual Studies program of University of California, Santa Cruz, working in the field of art and independent filmmaking in Sino-Southeast Asia. Her dissertation, titled "Intimate Seas: Haptic Visuality and Radical Relationality in Contemporary Seascapes from Asian Borderwaters," examines contemporary seascapes from Hong Kong and Taiwan that embody representations and imaginations of displacement and migratory routes across Asian waters, considering how these visual productions reveal the entangled histories of displacement across Asia resulting from the forces of colonialism and settler colonialism, authoritarianism, war and U.S. imperialism, and ethno- nationalism. She teaches and writes about diaspora, cultural identity, and spectrality in East and Southeast Asian contemporary visual culture.

Prior to joining UCSC, she was active as an art critic, researcher, and television presenter of cultural programs in Hong Kong. She has received the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards - Award for Young Artist in Art Criticism, was shortlisted in the International Awards for Art Criticism, and has contributed catalog essays to a number of institutions, including M+ (Hong Kong) and Asian Art Museum (San Francisco). 

Summary of Expertise

• Contemporary art of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia
• Sinophone cinema
• Diaspora theory

Research Interests

Contemporary visual culture of Asian borderlands and borderwaters; oceanic/seascape epistemologies; histories of migration and displacement across Asia; aftermaths of colonialism; haptic visuality; relationality in art-making; articulation / contamination of cultural identity in visual culture

Teaching Interests

• Hong Kong art 
• Modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia
• Global contemporary art, with an emphasis on the Global South
• Ghost and haunting in Asian cinema 
• Bodies in Chinese Cultures

Awards, Honors and Grants

• Arts Research Institute research cluster fund
• Arts Research Institute Summer Pathways Fellowship
• SEACoast Junior Scholar Research Funds
• Arts Dean's Fund for Excellence and Equity
• UCSC Graduate Dean's Research Travel Grant
• UCSC Regent's Fellowship
• 14th Hong Kong Art Development Awards - Award for Young Artist (Art Criticism)
• International Awards for Art Criticism 2019 (short list)

Selected Presentations

• "Intimacies on Board: On the Heterotopic Shipscape in Lu Yu-jui's Squid Jigging Fishing Boat series," School of Pacific and Asian Studies Annual Graduate Student Conference, 2026
• "Drifting Close: Tactile Knowing and Minor Intimacies in Lu Yu-jui's Squid Jigging Fishing Boat series," Getty Symposium 2026
• “Echoes of the Sea: Mediating the Diasporic Memory of the Tankas in Ballad on the Shore,” CAA Annual Conference 2025 
• “Unlikely Archive, Unruly History: Leung Chi-wo’s Montage Works About Hong Kong’s 1967 Riots,” AAS-in-Asia 2024
• “#hkurbanrecord: Cross-Surface Assemblage and the Practice of Care in Post-National Security Law Hong Kong,” UC Irvine Visual Studies Graduate Conference 2024
• “Unmooring Hong Kong: Archipelagic Imagination in Law Yuk-mui’s Song of the Exile,” Society of Hong Kong Studies Annual Conference 2023.
• ”Imaging the Miaos: Construction of Ethnic Difference in Visual Productions of the Qing Empire", UC Riverside, Department of History of Art 11th Annual Graduate Conference

Selected Publications

Selected publications:

• “Cyberpunk From the Margins: Kongkee and Dragon’s Delusion.” In Kongkee: Warring States Cyberpunk Exhibition Catalog. San Francisco: Asian Art Museum. (Forthcoming)
• “Unmooring Hong Kong: Archipelagic Imagination in Law Yuk-mui’s Song of the Exile.” In The Seawater, So Blue It’s Black. Hong Kong: Aco, 2025.
• “Floating Drifting Mobile Dwelling: Mobility as Sensibility in Jolene Mok’s Art Practice.” In Life is Elsewhere: Postcards from the Distant Land. Hong Kong: 1a space, 2022.
• “Heterochronicity as écriture féminine: Problematising the Historical Traumas of Taiwan and Indonesia.” In Letter, Callus, Post-War. Taipei: dmp editions, 2020.
• “Inventing Uselessness: on Japanese Influventors’ Revolt Against Work.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 22 (2020).
• “Dancing with the Tool: Considering Technologies in ‘Playcourt’ and ‘Negotiated Differences’.” In Shirley Tse: Stakeholders, Hong Kong in Venice. Hong Kong: M+, 2019.