Daoism’s transcultural and transhistorical resonances

Keynote:

Do Cinematic Images Exist in the World? A Daoist Response

David Chai
Chinese University of Hong Kong

If cinema is irreducibly photographic in nature, grounding its images in human reality and the natural world, does it have being? If we say yes, where does it come from? Supposing it is derived from the beings comprising a film, how is this possible when cinematic images do not exist outside of the temporality of their showing and the spatiality of the film onto which they are imprinted? If the ontology of cinematic images ends when their corresponding subjects die, then films never truly exist in the world and so are being-less. In contrast, sculptures stand in the world and reveal their being in said standing. From the perspective of Daoist philosophy, they do so because of their potential for self-fashioning. As with living things, the being of sculpture lies not in the image(s) of its form but in the intrinsic potential of its raw material to be sculpted and sculpt others via the place created in its self-standing. This is why Daoism holds the natural world is a sculptural collectivity in which each thing’s flourishing and perishing impacts those things around it. To grasp the source of this activity (the Dao) is to have a genuine ontological encounter with the world. How can cinema achieve this?

Panel ONE:

Dis-/Continuing Traditions: Chinese Contemporary Video Art and the Persistent Traces of Daoism

Paul Gladston
University of New South Wales

Daoism’s core envisioning of yin-yang – immanent dynamic cosmological reciprocity – is a major contributing factor to classical Chinese syncretic Daoist/Buddhist inflected neo-Confucian aesthetics. As such, it informs historical ideas and practices specific to Sinophone cultural contexts. These include: qiyun shengdong – vital energy resonance between all things – considered to be the ruling desideratum of Chinese classical painting and poetry; xushi – reciprocal interplay between formal substance and absence; xiuyang – self cultivation; the achievement of neixin – heart/innermost being – in the face of worldly conflicts and suffering; and  tian-ren-he-yi – respect for the unity of nature – as well as the possibility of oblique resistances to overweening authority described in the writings of Zhuangzi (3^rd century BCE) and exemplified by the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (3^rd century BCE). This paper will identify and discursively analyse persistent traces of Daoist/syncretic Confucian aesthetics discernible in relation to contemporary video art by Sinophone artists.

Contemporary Art across the Sinosphere is shaped generally by transcultural intersections between thinking and practice characteristic of defamiliarizing (deconstructive) European/American avant-garde modernist, postmodernist and contemporary art and aspects of localised Chinese culture. Such intersections are part of a longer relay of transculturality between China and Europe/America constitutive of modernity in each of those locations since the 17^th century.

It will be shown with reference to recent video art works by the artists Tong Wenmin and Zheng Xinhao that Daoism continues to inform Sinospheric contemporary art as part of a durable Chinese cultural habitus given increased prominence in recent years by official and unofficial institutional assertions of the value of classical Chinese culture. Video works by Tong and Zheng are thus open to parallactic interpretation as enacting disjunctive deconstructivist interventions with supposedly authoritative meaning while also carrying the traces of Daoist aspirations toward unity and harmony. The paper will conclude with a brief critical analysis of the possible significances of this transcultural relationship between deconstructivism and Daoist inflected aesthetics.

Panel ONE:

Nothingness as Film (Me)Ontology and Breath as Cinematic Engagement: Heidegger, Irigaray and Daoism

Kiki Tianqi Yu
Queen Mary University of London

Cinema has long been understood within a European art-historical lineage. Based on Renaissance vantage point perspective, cinema continues the function of painting as a representational object viewed by a human subject, or what Carroll calls ‘detached display’. This tradition, centred on the imitation of reality, informs André Bazin’s influential account of cinematic realism. Underlying the Bazinian preoccupation with realism, rooted in the ‘mummy complex’, lies a Western metaphysical understanding of nonbeing. This differs profoundly from the Daoist conception, which has significantly shaped Chinese aesthetic traditions where art is not grounded in mimesis but in “spiritual resonance.” Rather than reproducing reality, art seeks to attune to the generative rhythms of the Dao.

Early twentieth-century encounters with Chinese and Japanese art played a formative role in reshaping modern Western aesthetics. Exploring Chinese art theories, Laurance Binyon raised the question of “What conceptions of man and nature did they (the Chinese) seek to express? How did they conceive of art itself, and of its function in life?” Roger Fry’s engagement with six canons of Chinese painting, theorised by Xie He in the Sixth century, especially ‘rhythmic vitality’, has deeply influenced his formalist aesthetic theory. However, while modern western art also influenced the then new art of cinema, such transcultural aesthetic connections have been largely underexplored in the studies of film.

This paper proposes a rethinking of cinema through a Daoist (me)ontological cosmology that understands non-being (wu) not as absence but as a generative force. From this perspective, nothingness reconfigures film ontology and enables cinematic potentialities, revealing cinema as a breathing and meditative medium, especially in what I call ‘meditative cinema’. Drawing on my work-in-progress monograph Cinema that Breathes, I suggest that, like the breath-infused gestures of calligraphy, music and embodied performance art, cinema can carry the flow of qi and manifest ‘rhythmic vitality’. Bringing Daoism into dialogue with Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, and film phenomenology, I argue that moving images shape not only what is seen but also invite a mode of engagement through breathing, reconfiguring the relationship between humans and nature.

Panel TWO:

Adding a Transcendentalist Imperative (breathe in) to Daoist Meditative Practice (breathe out) in American Independent Cinema

Rob Stone
University of Birmingham, UK

This 19th century New England group of Transcendentalists led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, subscribed to an idealistic philosophy based upon an intuitive and imaginative understanding of the importance of active souls, interconnectedness with divine energy through nature, and the transformation of the knowledge and experience of the individual into self-reliance. Daoism, which reached America in the backwash from the European colonial presence in Asia (Hodder 2010: 28), impacts Transcendentalism “as a corrective to the centuries-long dominion of Christianity in the West” (Hodder 2010: 27) to the extent that Emerson would shock Harvard’s Divinity School in 1838 by proclaiming “Europe has always owed to oriental genius, its divine impulses” ([1838] 2014: 78). Thoreau too “was a confirmed exponent of the perennial wisdom he found illustrated in Asian scriptures” (Hodder 2010: 32) and his efforts at conjoining Transcendentalism with Daoism fed into the creative praxis of working towards an imagined life in ways that he deemed essential to the evolution of individualism and Emersonian perfectionism. In this paper derived from my forthcoming book Imagined Life: American Independent Cinema and Transcendentalism (EUP, 2026), I trace the dialectic of Transcendentalist and Daoist beliefs examined by Emerson and Thoreau and argue that their synthesis is evident in the themes and creative praxes of recent American independent films. Identifying filming and editing strategies that approximate meditative practice, in which films and their audiences breathe in (not without tension) and breathe out (with relief, finding our place in the cosmos), I parse films such as Slacker (Linklater, 1990), Clerks (Smith, 1994), Man Push Cart (Bahrani, 2005), Paterson (Jarmusch, 2016), The Rider (Zhao, 2017), Support The Girls (Bujalski, 2018), Nomadland (Zhao, 2020), Showing Up (Reichardt, 2022) and Train Dreams (Bentley, 2025) in search of a synthesis of Transcendentalist and Daoist beliefs aimed at transcendence.

Panel TWO:

A Few Thoughts on Simone Weil’s Daoist Inclinations

Anat Pick
Queen Mary University of London

What dignity it gives to the afflicted man who is succoured, to know that he can give Christ’s thanks to his benefactor. ὑπομονή [Hypomonē]—water in Taoism—Stoics. (Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks 84)

Although she is discussed largely in the context of Western philosophy and religion, Simone Weil (1909-1943) was deeply engaged with Eastern philosophies. A reader of classical Indian and Tibetan texts, Weil taught herself Sanskrit and was profoundly influenced by the Bhagavad Gita. The growing interest in Weil’s relationship to Eastern philosophy is evident in publications like Dharma and Detachment: Writings on Indian and Tibetan Thought (2025). Edited by Nicolas Bommarito, the volume is the first to gather in one place Weil’s different commentaries on Indo-Tibetan texts.

While her comments on Daoism are few and far between, several of Weil’s key ideas correspond to themes in Daoist philosophy. Her invocation of non-action, emptiness, self-effacement, and—most important—the idea of attention, parallel the Daoist notion of wu wei (acting without striving). This brief “working paper” examines Weil’s concept of attention as a “negative effort” in relation to both art and to Weil’s provocative understanding of extreme suffering, which she called affliction (malheur). Attention as a mode of detachment and subjective undoing reveals the reality of suffering as something impersonal. In this way, Weil offers a counter-narrative to popular discourses of wellness and wellbeing, a narrative that resonates with, and diverges from, Daoist approaches to suffering. Focusing on my forthcoming book, Simone Weil and the Cinema of Affliction, on the intersection of Weil’s theology and film, I discuss Weil’s bridging between Christian and Eastern approaches in her search for a truly syncretic spirituality.

Panel TWO:

Forests, Spirits and Tree Burial: Revisiting Daoism and Animism in Japanese Cinema

Yuehan Liu
Chengdu University of Technology

Worldviews shape the way we see, know, and understand the world. The modern Western dualism separates subject from object, and human from nature, causing anxiety around existence and mortality. Therefore, revisiting worldviews beyond dominant paradigms is necessary for thinking about our relations with the world.

This paper traces two strands of East Asian thought through cinema: Japanese animism and Daoist philosophy. With roots in ancient Shinto, Buddhist and folk traditions, Japanese animism thinks of the world as full of kami in which spirits residing in trees, mountains, and waters. In this way of thinking, there is no strict boundary between living and dead, and ancestors are able to exist within nature. Daoist thought, with its emphasis on transformation and the continuity of vital energy, also refuses to see death as a rupture. From this view, human existence is situated in the spontaneous flux of the natural world. These ideas are evident in the contemporary practice of tree burial. More than a substitute for conventional graves, tree burial also carries a cultural aspiration to return to and to merge with the nature. In this sense, it resonates with both animist and Daoist thoughts: death as integration into nature’s ongoing cycles.

Through an analysis of Hayao Miyazaki’s animistic forests, and Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest (2007) and Sweet Bean (2015), where trees become sites for mourning and remembering, I argue that contemporary Japanese cinema serves as a critical medium for representing these threads of thought concerning life, death and nature. These films invite us to see that death is not an ending but a form of participation, which shifts focus from the fear of loss to an acceptance of being part of a transforming universe.

Panel THREE:

Ethics: The Ontologico-Technological Double Bind in Neo-Confucianism

Victor Fan
King’s College London

In recent years, many scholars in China and India advocate the use of Hindu, Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian frameworks to reimagine a more harmonious ecology between sentient beings and the machine, as well as a more ethical notion of algorithmic governmentality. In China, Qian Yi, He Jiankun, and Lu Feng from the Tsinghua University research group on ecocivilization also call for a renewal of Marxism via Daoism and Buddhism to help dismantle the binary opposition between subject and object. Song Bing and his cohorts propose the use of the idea of gongsheng/kosei (inter-becoming) to replace the Marxist notion of dialectic materialism.

However, relational, processual, and ecological understandings of the relationship among sentient beings, technics, and their associated natural and sociopolitical milieu does not guarantee a more holistic and democratic mode of sociality and governmentality. In fact, in the Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian debates on sociality and governmentality that gradually became what we call neo-Confucianism, ethics is often ambivalently posited both as the ontological ground of a cosmojuridical order and a technology of governance. Such a philosophical double bind have historically produced opportunities for philosophers and those of govern to justify political violence.

In my presentation, I focus specifically on the debate on Zhou Dunyi’s annotations of the Taiji tu shuo [Explanations of the Diagram of the Supreme] among his students Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi as well as the political appropriation of this debate by Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming. I also examine that revisions of this debate by scholars associated with the 1958 “Manifesto on Behalf of Chinese Culture Respectfully Announced to the World” and the more recent scholars who are instrumental in the Communist Party’s policymaking.