Concepts

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.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture, and in “Rhizome in the Shadows: Transplantation of Korean Running Man in the Rise of Screen-capitalism,” Continuum 34 (2020): 73–87. DOI · Article

Amnyu names the persistence of Korean screen culture when its Korean origin is altered, localized, obscured, or disavowed. It describes how Korean audiovisual forms continue to operate after they no longer appear securely, or even visibly, as Korean.

Amnyu concerns an aesthetic and relational process as much as a political one. It tracks how audiovisual forms, affects, industrial practices, and modes of participation survive through mutation, collaboration, localization, and partial invisibility across national, linguistic, and platform boundaries.

It identifies neither hidden Korean influence nor Chinese imitation, but a process of co-constituted transnational reassembly in which origin survives as a shifting trace.

The concept also names durable industrial transformation beneath the visibility of formal cultural exchange, including personnel training, workflow standardization, production practices, and institutional reconfiguration.

Amnyu is therefore not simply a reaction to censorship or geopolitical restriction. The book ultimately argues that it is an ontological condition of Hallyu: an undercurrent that has always sustained Korean screen culture’s capacity to survive through mutation, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and reassembly.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture. Related article

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.

Lingualscape names the shifting terrain of language in transnational screen culture, where affective negotiation takes precedence over denotational accuracy, and where the very failure to speak “properly” can open spaces for transnational empathy.

The lingualscape is an imagination not of a common language but of powerful multiplicities: onomatopoeia, glossolalia, untranslated lyrics, dance, song, and secret scripts through which publics “speak” to one another outside standardized official languages. It is proposed as a site where communication through affective negotiation rises above the violence of official languages rather than forthrightly contesting that violence.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture (Chapter 2, on I Am a Singer; Chapter 4, on Nüshu and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan), and in “Bang Bang Bang—Nonsense or an Alternative Language?: The Lingualscape in the Chinese Remake of I Am a Singer,” China Perspectives no. 3 (2019): 37–45. DOI

Transplantability is the capacity of screen culture to root itself in heterogeneous cultural soils through adaptive mimicry and strategic self-erasure. Like a rhizome, it propagates through decentralized, non-hierarchical modes, thriving not through centralized roots but through lateral connections.

It transplants formats, replants stars and narratives, and hybridizes distribution, as when Chinese remakes of Running Man and I Am a Singer erased Korean branding to fit postsocialist soil.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture, and in “Rhizome in the Shadows,” Continuum 34 (2020). Article

Affective symbiosis is a bond among viewers, sustained by shared sensory and affective experience, through which belonging is negotiated in shared labor and attachment even as it remains entangled with capitalist imperatives.

As the core mechanism of Screen Capitalism, it constructs (trans)national communities across space and time, language and ideology. It is not a harmonious community already achieved but a contingent process, renewed through repeated acts of viewing, interpretation, adaptation, and recirculation. To study it, I propose affective thinking: a synthesis of critical reflection and emotional resonance that refuses the dichotomy between reason and feeling.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture.

Semiotic calibration is the capacity of audiovisual texts to transcend language barriers via shared sensory cues, such as K-pop choreography’s viral kinetics, the frequent use of onomatopoeia, and haptic interactions on and off the screen. National markers, once anchored in linguistic solidarity, fragment into aesthetic-ideological assemblages.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture.

Where print culture produced imagined observation, Screen Capitalism produces imagined inter-action: a participatory semiotics in which screen narratives mobilize real-world participation and bind onscreen content to offscreen practice. The hyphen marks its action-driven, dynamic relationality.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture.

Decentered multiplicity is a survival strategy that extends longevity and scale by embracing fragmentation, as in the simultaneous state endorsement of Hallyu-inspired programming and the underground circulation of K-dramas through unofficial channels. Its generative power lies not in defiance but in dispersion.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture.

Gendered Screen Capitalism names the organization of circulation by gender: how female friendship, male spectacle, the female gaze, and boys’ love reading move through commercial systems that can enable relation while also commodifying, disciplining, and recapturing it.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture (Chapters 4 and 5).

Reciprocal localization follows the undercurrent in reverse, as Chinese short drama, group streaming, and costume drama travel to Southeast Asia and back to Korea carrying what they absorbed from Korean screens.

Developed in the first book, Riding the Korean Wave in China: The Afterlives of Korean Screen Culture (Epilogue). See also Amnyu.

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.

Tian Li, “Channeling Alterity: Toward a Theory of Shamanic Audiovisualization,” Theory, Culture & Society, OnlineFirst 2026. doi.org/10.1177/02632764261479605 · Excerpt: “the way we archive trauma is, itself, a matter of 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.

Developed in the second book project, The Spectral Screen: Media, Law, and the Historical Transformation of Screen Justice (book manuscript in progress), and in “Opening a Virtual Space before the Door of the Law,” positions: asia critique 32, no. 3 (2024). DOI · Article

The spectral screen is the medium through which justice becomes perceptible and actionable only in mediated form, and which therefore always risks mistaking its own image for justice itself. The phrase names neither a genre nor a technology: a ritual film, a televised trial, and a predictive interface can each become a spectral screen.

Behind it lies a historical condition I call intermediation: the fact that justice becomes socially available only through institutions and media—files, testimony, rituals, images, interfaces—that make injuries, persons, memories, and futures appear in particular forms.

Developed in the second book project, The Spectral Screen: Media, Law, and the Historical Transformation of Screen Justice (book manuscript in progress).

A medium serves justice when it remains receptive to what exceeds it; it betrays justice when it forgets that it mediates. I call the first stance channeling and the second the false altar.

Channeling is the operation by which something absent, excluded, or not yet legible—the dead, a survivor’s claim, collective feeling, a projected future—addresses the present through a medium and gains social force, while the medium does not pretend to have made it fully present. Its ethical stance is receptivity: listening before verdict. The false altar names the opposite movement: the moment a medium authorizes its own representation—archive, spectacle, public sentiment, evidence, decree, or probability—as if it were justice itself.

Developed in the second book project, The Spectral Screen: Media, Law, and the Historical Transformation of Screen Justice (book manuscript in progress). See also Shamanic Audiovisualization.

The Togani effect names the circuit among images, spectators, public feeling, advocacy, and institutions through which the film Silenced (2011) helped produce Korea’s Dogani Act. The screen makes right perceptible before law can fully recognize it, and that perceptibility can become one condition of reform, though never its guarantee.

The effect is contingent, institution-dependent, and ambivalent: collective affect can open institutions to previously excluded claims, but it can also harden into punitive certainty.

Developed in “Opening a Virtual Space before the Door of the Law: The Transnational Togani Effect from Silenced to Angels Wear White,” positions: asia critique 32, no. 3 (2024). DOI · Article

Counter-forensic screens are documentaries made by survivors, witnesses, and independent filmmakers who take up the instruments of evidence themselves: surveillance footage, photographs, recorded calls, letters, and testimony. They do not merely represent a case. They reopen it, reassemble its evidence, and present it to a public that the court either never convened or has already dismissed—channeling through evidence, without pretending that evidence has made the event fully present.

Developed in the second book project, The Spectral Screen: Media, Law, and the Historical Transformation of Screen Justice (book manuscript in progress).