Tian (Esther) Li

Media Theorist, Cultural Scholar, and Author

Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Korea University

I develop media theory through screen cultures, examining how media organize capital, alterity, judgment, and human agency across East Asia and beyond.

→ Research

→ Concepts

Resume

esthertianli@gmail.com

Tian (Esther) Li

Media Theorist, Cultural Scholar, and Author

Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Korea University

I develop media theory through screen cultures, examining how media organize capital, alterity, judgment, and human agency across East Asia and beyond.

→ Research

→ Concepts

Resume

esthertianli@gmail.com

research

research

Media Theory & Media Philosophy

My central research question is what media can do beyond representation. I examine how media organize value, circulation, presence, judgment, affect, and agency, and how these capacities reshape human relations.

Core questions: What powers do media acquire when they cease to be merely representational? How do screens organize capital, presence, judgment, and agency? How do media alter the boundaries between human and nonhuman actors? What happens to judgment and responsibility when machines begin to interpret, respond, and decide?

Screen Capitalism & Transnational Media

This research examines the circulation, remaking, localization, and transformation of audiovisual cultures across national borders. Rather than treating China as a passive market for Korean cultural export, I use Sino-Korean screen circulation as a site for theorizing contemporary transnational media ecology.

My first book develops Screen Capitalism and Amnyu as frameworks for understanding how media circulate through industrial transfer, localization, affective exchange, mutation, and partial invisibility.

Alterity, Religion & Audiovisual Media

This strand of my research examines how media relate to alterity, ritual, spirituality, and presence. Rather than asking only how media represent religious or shamanic practices, I ask how audiovisual forms themselves participate in mediation.

My concept of Shamanic Audiovisualization develops this argument by theorizing audiovisual media as a site through which alterity may be made perceptible as presence.

Law, Judgment & Screen Justice

My second major research project examines how screens become alternative sites of judgment when formal legal institutions fail.

Moving across Korean cinema and television, the project asks how media produce testimony, judgment, moral visibility, and public forms of justice. It develops the concept of Screen Justice as a broader theory of media, law, and judgment.

Human–AI Relations

My emerging work on artificial intelligence extends these questions into human–AI relations. I am interested in agency, judgment, responsibility, creativity, and the changing meaning of the human when nonhuman systems begin to generate, interpret, respond, and decide.

This research connects media philosophy with contemporary questions of AI governance and ethics.

Media Theory & Media Philosophy

My central research question is what media can do beyond representation. I examine how media organize value, circulation, presence, judgment, affect, and agency, and how these capacities reshape human relations.

Core questions: What powers do media acquire when they cease to be merely representational? How do screens organize capital, presence, judgment, and agency? How do media alter the boundaries between human and nonhuman actors? What happens to judgment and responsibility when machines begin to interpret, respond, and decide?

Media Theory & Media Philosophy

My central research question is what media can do beyond representation. I examine how media organize value, circulation, presence, judgment, affect, and agency, and how these capacities reshape human relations.

Core questions: What powers do media acquire when they cease to be merely representational? How do screens organize capital, presence, judgment, and agency? How do media alter the boundaries between human and nonhuman actors? What happens to judgment and responsibility when machines begin to interpret, respond, and decide?

Screen Capitalism & Transnational Media

This research examines the circulation, remaking, localization, and transformation of audiovisual cultures across national borders. Rather than treating China as a passive market for Korean cultural export, I use Sino-Korean screen circulation as a site for theorizing contemporary transnational media ecology.

My first book develops Screen Capitalism and Amnyu as frameworks for understanding how media circulate through industrial transfer, localization, affective exchange, mutation, and partial invisibility.

Alterity, Religion & Audiovisual Media

This strand of my research examines how media relate to alterity, ritual, spirituality, and presence. Rather than asking only how media represent religious or shamanic practices, I ask how audiovisual forms themselves participate in mediation.

My concept of Shamanic Audiovisualization develops this argument by theorizing audiovisual media as a site through which alterity may be made perceptible as presence.

Law, Judgment & Screen Justice

My second major research project examines how screens become alternative sites of judgment when formal legal institutions fail.

Moving across Korean cinema and television, the project asks how media produce testimony, judgment, moral visibility, and public forms of justice. It develops the concept of Screen Justice as a broader theory of media, law, and judgment.

Human–AI Relations

My emerging work on artificial intelligence extends these questions into human–AI relations. I am interested in agency, judgment, responsibility, creativity, and the changing meaning of the human when nonhuman systems begin to generate, interpret, respond, and decide.

This research connects media philosophy with contemporary questions of AI governance and ethics.

Media Theory & Media Philosophy

My central research question is what media can do beyond representation. I examine how media organize value, circulation, presence, judgment, affect, and agency, and how these capacities reshape human relations.

Core questions: What powers do media acquire when they cease to be merely representational? How do screens organize capital, presence, judgment, and agency? How do media alter the boundaries between human and nonhuman actors? What happens to judgment and responsibility when machines begin to interpret, respond, and decide?

Research


Concepts

Concepts

My work develops conceptual frameworks for understanding how media operate beyond representation, shaping circulation, presence, judgment, and social relations.

SCREEN CAPITALISM

Screen Capitalism names the systemic logic through which audiovisual media circulate, expand, localize, commodify, deterritorialize, and reterritorialize. It describes screen media not simply as cultural content or representation, but as infrastructures through which capital, affect, attention, industrial knowledge, and cultural forms move across borders.

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.

SHAMANIC AUDIOVISUALIZATION

Shamanic Audiovisualization theorizes how audiovisual media do more than represent alterity. It examines how media can mediate, channel, and make alterity perceptible as presence.

The concept asks what happens when media cease to function merely as representational surfaces and instead become sites through which different forms of presence, agency, and relationality are produced.

SCREEN JUSTICE

Screen Justice examines how screens become sites of testimony, judgment, and justice when formal legal institutions fail, prove inadequate, or lose legitimacy.

The concept asks how cinema and television do more than represent law: how they can stage judgment, redistribute moral visibility, produce public testimony, and function as alternative sites of jurisprudence.

Screen Capitalism and Amnyu are related but distinct concepts. Screen Capitalism names the systemic logic through which audiovisual media circulate, expand, localize, commodify, deterritorialize, and reterritorialize. Amnyu names the historical-cultural phenomenon produced through that process: the submerged and mutable persistence of Korean screen culture after visible national origin becomes unstable.

The conceptual move from Hallyu to Amnyu makes it possible to theorize cultural persistence without equating persistence with visible national branding.

Concepts

My work develops conceptual frameworks for understanding how media operate beyond representation, shaping circulation, presence, judgment, and social relations.

SCREEN CAPITALISM

Screen Capitalism names the systemic logic through which audiovisual media circulate, expand, localize, commodify, deterritorialize, and reterritorialize. It describes screen media not simply as cultural content or representation, but as infrastructures through which capital, affect, attention, industrial knowledge, and cultural forms move across borders.

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.

SHAMANIC AUDIOVISUALIZATION

Shamanic Audiovisualization theorizes how audiovisual media do more than represent alterity. It examines how media can mediate, channel, and make alterity perceptible as presence.

The concept asks what happens when media cease to function merely as representational surfaces and instead become sites through which different forms of presence, agency, and relationality are produced.

SCREEN JUSTICE

Screen Justice examines how screens become sites of testimony, judgment, and justice when formal legal institutions fail, prove inadequate, or lose legitimacy.

The concept asks how cinema and television do more than represent law: how they can stage judgment, redistribute moral visibility, produce public testimony, and function as alternative sites of jurisprudence.

Screen Capitalism and Amnyu are related but distinct concepts. Screen Capitalism names the systemic logic through which audiovisual media circulate, expand, localize, commodify, deterritorialize, and reterritorialize. Amnyu names the historical-cultural phenomenon produced through that process: the submerged and mutable persistence of Korean screen culture after visible national origin becomes unstable.

The conceptual move from Hallyu to Amnyu makes it possible to theorize cultural persistence without equating persistence with visible national branding.