Hi, I'm Tian Li!
I am an Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Korea University and a media theorist working across film, media, and cultural studies. My research asks how screens and other media forms organize capital, alterity, judgment, and human agency.
Rather than treating East Asia simply as a regional object of study, I work through Korean and Chinese screen cultures as sites from which broader media theory can be developed. My research spans transnational media, media philosophy, law and justice, religion and shamanism, and human–AI relations.
Prior to joining Korea University, I held academic appointments and taught at Yale University, Harvard University, and Stanford University. At Harvard, my teaching was recognized with an award for Teaching Excellence.
Research Focus
My work develops media theory through the study of screen cultures. I am especially interested in what media do beyond representation: how they organize value, circulation, presence, judgment, affect, and agency.
Across my books and articles, I develop concepts including Screen Capitalism, Amnyu, Shamanic Audiovisualization, and Screen Justice. These concepts emerge from East Asian screen cultures but are intended to address larger questions in media theory and media philosophy.
Concepts
My work develops conceptual frameworks for understanding how media operate beyond representation, shaping circulation, presence, judgment, and social relations.
Screen Capitalism
The systemic logic through which audiovisual media circulate, expand, localize, commodify, deterritorialize, and reterritorialize — screen media as infrastructures through which capital, affect, attention, industrial knowledge, and cultural forms move across borders.
Read the concept →Amnyu暗流 · “Undercurrent”
A concept for understanding how screen cultures persist after national origin becomes altered, localized, obscured, or disavowed. Amnyu names a process of co-constituted transnational reassembly in which origin survives as a shifting trace.
Read the concept →Shamanic Audiovisualization
How audiovisual media do more than represent alterity: how media can mediate, channel, and make alterity perceptible as presence.
Read the concept →Screen Justice
How screens become sites of testimony, judgment, and justice when formal legal institutions fail, prove inadequate, or lose legitimacy.
Read the concept →More concepts: Lingualscape · Transplantability · Affective Symbiosis · Semiotic Calibration · Imagined Inter-action · Decentered Multiplicity · Gendered Screen Capitalism · Reciprocal Localization · The Spectral Screen · Channeling and the False Altar · The Togani Effect · Counter-Forensic Screens
Books
First book · Under contract with University of Michigan Press
Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture
The book examines what happens to Korean audiovisual culture after its national origin becomes unstable, obscured, localized, or disavowed in China. Rather than telling a conventional story of Korean cultural export, influence, hybridity, or soft power, it asks how Korean audiovisual forms continue to operate after they no longer appear securely—or even visibly—as Korean.
The book develops two central concepts: Screen Capitalism and Amnyu. Screen Capitalism describes the systemic logic through which audiovisual media circulate, localize, commodify, deterritorialize, and reterritorialize. Amnyu names the submerged and mutable persistence of Korean screen culture through localized forms, industrial knowledge transfer, affective practices, and transnational reassembly.
China functions here not simply as a national case or receiving market, but as a generative site from which transnational media theory can be revised.
Second book · Book manuscript in progress
The Spectral Screen: Media, Law, and the Historical Transformation of Screen Justice
My second book project examines how screens become alternative sites of judgment when formal legal institutions fail, prove inadequate, or lose legitimacy. Through cinema and television, the project investigates how testimony, evidence, moral judgment, punishment, memory, and justice are reconfigured through screen media.
The project develops Screen Justice as a conceptual framework for understanding media not only as representations of law, but as active sites where judgment and public forms of justice are produced. Its chapters move from shamanic channeling and the ethics of receptivity, through televised judgment and affective populism, the transnational Togani effect, and counter-forensic screens in Japan, Korea, and China, to supernatural judgment on the speculative screen and the limits of algorithmic justice in an age of prediction.
Articles
Essays and reflections on media theory, screen culture, modernity, law, and transnational media.
Events
- 2026
Invited talkCenter for Korean Studies, University of California, Los Angeles · Jan 29, 2026 - 2026
Invited talkHow Korea Impact Chinese Popular CultureCenter for Chinese Studies, University of California, Los Angeles - 2025
ConferenceIntertextuality Across Histories and Geographies in Contemporary East Asian CinemaSociety for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, IL · April 3–6 - 2025
ConferenceNetworking Women: East Asian Women in Global Cinematic MediaRound table, National Conference of the Asian Studies Development Program, Washington, D.C. · March 6–8 - 2024
Invited talkEast Asian Studies Center, University of Southern California · Oct 31, 2024 - 2024
Invited talkGlobal Korean Screen Culture in Postsocialist ChinaCarnegie Mellon University - 2023
ConferenceReframing Korean Screen Culture: Recent Changes in Social, Gender, and Industrial LandscapesKorean Screen Culture Conference, Melbourne, Australia · December 1–2 - 2023
Invited talkCouncil on East Asian Studies, Yale University · Apr 26, 2023
SEED
I am also the founder and CEO of Seed Consultancy (SEED), where my work on AI governance and cross-cultural strategy extends a broader intellectual interest in judgment, agency, responsibility, and the human in an age of increasingly autonomous media systems.
Nurturing Minds, Moving Mountains.