Ziyue Shang 商子岳

I’m an ethnographer and performance artist currently pursuing a Master in Design Studies in Publics at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Before that, I graduated from University College London (UCL) with first-class honours in Global Humanitarian Studies.

My research interests lie at the intersection of multimodal anthropology, body/embodiment, queer/gender politics, and the socialist state. My current work explores the formation of queer subjectivities in relation to socialist moral ideology, asking how state-produced moral values are embodied, negotiated, and unsettled in everyday life. I am exploring ways of responding to this question through ethnographic research on performance art (行为艺术 xingwei yishu) and live art (现场艺术 xianchang yishu) communities, while also attending to broader forms of queer public culture, including ballroom, dance, digital shorts, and other vernacular media and bodily practices.

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Performance Art 行为&现场

1. Everything is FINE!
2. Solidarity is the POWER 团结就是力量
3. Lipstick
4. Hand in Hand, At Play
5. Underground Park Mushroom Hop
   
6. Jumping the Long Rope
7. Same but Difference (Spring Equinox)
   
8. Towards Dirt
9. Go Round and Round
10. Radio Calisthenics

Voice from the Community 社区&声音

1. ‘Praising‘ Colonialism
   
2. Qingdao Zhongshan Road
3. Hague Mothers
   
4. Lines That Almost Meet
5. Vagina Monologue Series (in-progress)
   

Creative Writing 写作

1. Autoethnography (in-progress)

Public Engagement & Academic Conference 展览&会议&其他

1. Rebuilding: Sites/Sights of East Asia: 31th Columbia GradCon
2. EXPERIMENT: Rethinking Representation, Methods, & Knowledge American Ethnological Society (AES) Spring Conference
3. DIRT: NSSR Anthropology Graduate Student Conference
   
4. IMPACT: Durham Anthropology Graduate Student Conference

Radio Calisthenics

Index

Video Made for Live Performance

Beginning with the media and internet ecology of socialist China, this project is grounded in the widespread practice of “keyboard politics” on contemporary Chinese social media platforms. Through memes, parody, irony, sarcasm, and coded expressions, people discuss politics while also avoiding, displacing, and performing it. Rather than treating these online expressions as disembodied text, the project asks how platform-based political speech might produces its own bodily habits.


The project juxtaposes these contemporary internet discourses with radio calisthenics, a socialist bodily practice widely promoted in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Through unified commands, rhythms, and movements, radio calisthenics embedded collectivity, discipline, and socialist values into everyday bodily practice. By rechoreographing radio calisthenics through comments, memes, and online political discourse, this project brings keyboard politics out of the screen and into physical space, translating it into movement, sound, and gesture. Rather than restaging the original radio calisthenics, it creates a form of “comment-section calisthenics,” making visible the political reflexes, satirical mechanisms, and bodily tensions embedded in contemporary internet politics.

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