Bio
Karen Fang is a film scholar and cultural critic who writes about the intersection of eastern and western aesthetics in global culture. Her books and publications span nineteenth-century British writing about exotic objects to twentieth and twenty-first century Hong Kong film, and explore how moments of modernization excite visual and narrative art.
Karen’s most recent book, Arresting Cinema: Surveillance in Hong Kong Film, looks at scenes of social, spatial and data monitoring within one of the world’s most influential cinemas outside of Hollywood. The book, praised for a “premise as fascinating and bone-chilling as some of the film noir flicks it describes,” appeared on the twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s transition to Chinese sovereignty, and its analysis of Hong Kong cinema’s unique and recurring variations on themes long central to Hollywood movies is both an illuminating account of an extraordinary national cinema and a telling glimpse into global surveillance culture.
Originally trained as a “Romanticist” specializing in early nineteenth-century British poets like Lord Byron and John Keats, Karen is fascinated by the cross-pollination of modern life. Knowledge of the 1820s founding of the London police informs her study of the 1980s Hong Kong police, and many years documenting surveillance motifs in the work of Hong Kong cinema auteurs like John Woo, Michael Hui and Wong Kar-wai illuminates Karen’s more recent writing on canonical surveillance novels like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
At the University of Houston, Fang is a Professor in the Department of English, and she also is founder and chair of a college-level initiative in Media and the Moving Image. As with her involvement in cultural institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Poland’s Five Flavours Film Festival, Fang is a firm believer in art’s capacity to enrich civic life. Many of her former students now work in the arts or other creative industries, and Fang’s writing and teaching has been supported by fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Winterthur Museum, and the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies.
As a mother, child of immigrants, and Sunday painter, Karen is especially honored to be currently working on a book about Bambi artist and Disney Legend Tyrus Wong. Despite arriving when US laws prohibited citizenship to Chinese immigrants, Tyrus went on to shape many areas of American visual culture. Researching Tyrus’s life has required deep dives into diverse archives ranging from Disney, Warner Bros., Hallmark, the Smithsonian, and US Customs and Immigration, but the best reward of the project is meeting the community Tyrus inspired and the legacy of creative joy he leaves behind.
Since starting this book project on Tyrus Wong, Karen has become a regular contributor to the nationally broadcast public radio program, The Engines of Our Ingenuity, where she focuses on stories about artistic innovations and art’s contribution to science and technology. She also initiated and helped produce a short documentary on Tyrus’s friend and contemporary, the pioneering immigration attorney Y.C. Hong.