East Asian Humanities Workshop: "A Sea of Specters: Environment and Imagination in the Taiwan Strait" by Chris Cristóbal Chan

Please join us for Chris Chan's talk "A Sea of Specters: Environment and Imagination in the Taiwan Strait."

This event will take place on Thursday, November 13, 2025, from 4:30-6:00 pm in Knight Building Room 201. A casual dinner for attendees will follow in the same room. 

Please RSVP by Friday, November 7, using the RSVP Form.

A Sea of Specters: Environment and Imagination in the Taiwan Strait

Keywords: Taiwan, Revitalization, Ghosts, Marine Waste, Sea borders, Contemporary Art

Abstract: The littoral coasts in the Taiwan Strait exist in a spectral condition: both haunted by ghosts and also littered with “ghost nets” and a spectrum of other material anthropogenic waste washed back up ashore.  This paper examines the archipelagic maritime borders in the Taiwan Strait and the ways in which islanders and visiting artists contend with the ghosts of political and lived material conditions through an aspiration to “exorcise” the spectral milieu.  Through an investigation of the remediated afterlives ghost nets washed ashore, I ask, how do different images of spectrality take on material forms as environment refuse and, likewise, become mirrored by homologous social imaginations of political and existential crises mediated through state-sponsored public contemporary art production? This paper examines the ways in which Taiwanese environmental artists working at the confluence of politically-disputed waters remake macro-environmental conditions beyond their control by turning plastic marine waste back into “revitalized” lifeworlds. By recasting ecological waste as environmental media for imagination and creative production, this paper takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the relations between environmental “deathscapes” and their intricate relations with aspirations for new life by Taiwanese islanders and artists and, moreover, seeks to unmoor our understandings of what it means to coexist in a world with increasingly “spectral” environments.  

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Speaker Bio: Chris Cristóbal Chan received his PhD in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. With a multidisciplinary background with degrees in East Asian Studies and Civil Engineering from Rice University and Stanford University, he is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to studying contemporary issues, particularly in China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia. His research involves imaginations of sovereignty as it is (re)mediated through making art and remaking environments. Through a multi-sited ethnography across various field sites off the coast of China, his research follows a series of seafaring artists who are involved in site-specific work on border islands situated at China’s pelagic peripheries and examines how their mobility and mobilization by the state make manifest a greater concern with living-with or contending with future crisis. The role that artists and the environment play together in crafting culture in crisis becomes a lens through which the contemporary problem of living together in a shared world can be studied as an anthropological question. His research has also been the recipient of the Social Science Research Council International Research Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Fellowship.

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Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the East Asian Humanities Workshop aims at promoting intra- and inter-departmental communication among faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars who share research and teaching interests in East Asia in the Stanford community. In particular, it is intended to foster stronger ties between EALC faculty and graduate students across the China-Japan-Korea programs as well as greater cross-disciplinary exchange among East Asian Studies scholars across the humanities and social science disciplines, including literature, linguistics, history, art history, religion, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and political science. It is also intended to enhance graduate student professionalization. The workshop meets, on average, twice a month during the academic year and engages in a variety of activities determined by its participants.

If you have suggestions you would like to make for future workshop activities, please feel free to email your ideas to our 2025-26 faculty supervisor, Ariel Stilerman (stilerman [at] stanford.edu (stilerman[at]stanford[dot]edu)), and our graduate student coordinators, Rosaley Gai (rgai [at] stanford.edu (rgai[at]stanford[dot]edu)) and Michael Baiamonte (bwxuan38 [at] stanford.edu (bwxuan38[at]stanford[dot]edu)). For those interested, please request to join our mailing list for future event announcements: Link to mailing list for upcoming events.