Vision

In a world marked by ecological crisis, persistent political conflicts, rapid technological changes, rising anxieties about collective wellness, art—and cinema in particular—does more than mirror or critique these conditions; it becomes a crucial medium for reimagining ways of being, sensing, and relating in post-Anthropocentric and decolonial world building.

The AHRC funded interdisciplinary project “Daoism, Cinema, and Wellbeing” shifts contemporary debates on ecological crisis and collective wellbeing while contributing to the decolonisation of knowledge production. It responds to critiques of anthropocentrism and Western-centric posthumanism, and offers a corrective by arguing for the conceptual power of non-western philosophies. Such perspectives remain rare in the studies of cinema and visual art.

Daoism, a foundational strand of traditional Chinese thought, articulates a correlative, meontological, and transformative cosmology. This worldview has had a lasting influence on the understandings of cosmology, ecological sensibility, wellbeing, and traditional artistic practices in the Sinosphere and East Asian cultures. It has also influenced aesthetic formations globally in a transcultural context.

By systematically bringing an ancient yet still vital non-Western tradition—Daoism—into dialogue with cinema, the project situates Daoism in transcultural philosophical and aesthetic exchanges, to reshape how we understand cinema and its impact on ecology and wellbeing of all.