About

Jason McGrath is a professor and the Director of Graduate Studies & Chinese Flagship Program at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. His research focuses on Chinese and international cinemas, modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, and issues of realism in fiction, film, and theory. He explores themes related to intertextuality in film theory, art and the nation, as well as Chinese and Western Marxism.

Research topics

• Visual arts
• Art
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Literature
• Archaeology
• Epistemology
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Geography
• Art history
• Media studies
• Philosophy
• History

Selected publications

• Suppositionality, Virtuality, and Chinese Cinema

  boundary 2 · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Aesthetics

  In Chinese performance arts, one thing that was largely abandoned in the shift from traditional drama to motion pictures was the suppositionality of Chinese operatic performance, and the transition to digital cinema, particularly in the case of big-budget blockbusters that compete for mass audiences in greater China as well as abroad, raises the question of if and how an aesthetic of suppositionality is related to the emerging virtual realism enabled by computer-generated imagery (CGI). The concept of suppositionality not only helps us to evaluate how contemporary Chinese animation and CGI blockbusters remediate premodern cultural narratives but also provides an analytical measure for approaching the growing phenomenon of motion capture and composited performances. The “virtual realism” of CGI frees Chinese filmmakers to reject the ontological realism of photography and instead favor an aggressively animated style of visual effects while returning actors to a reprise of the suppositional performance style of traditional opera.

  PublisherDOI

• Chinese Film

  University of Minnesota Press eBooks · 2022-11-11 · 10 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Each Chinese cinematic era, whether the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, has necessitated its own form in conversation with broader trends in politics and culture. <br><br> In *Chinese Film,* Jason McGrath tells this fascinating story by tracing the varied claims to cinematic realism made by Chinese filmmakers, officials, critics, and scholars. Understanding realism as a historical dynamic that is both enabled and mitigated by aesthetic conventions of the day, he analyzes it across six different types of claims: ontological, perceptual, fictional, social, prescriptive, and apophatic. <br><br> Through this method, McGrath makes major claims not just about Chinese cinema but also about realism as an aesthetic form that negotiates between cultural conventions and the ever-evolving real. He comes to envision this as more than just a cinematic question, showing how the struggle for realism is central to the Chinese struggle for modernity.

  PublisherDOI

• 2 Heroic Human Pixels: Mass Ornaments and Digital Multitudes in Zhang Yimou’s Spectacles

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Geography
  • Visual arts
  PublisherDOI

• Heroic Human Pixels: Mass Ornaments and Digital Multitudes in Zhang Yimou’s Spectacles

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art
  • Art history

  This chapter considers how Zhang Yimou has reimagined traditional Chinese culture and history through the use of CGI in his blockbuster film <italic>Hero</italic> (<italic>Yingxiong</italic>, 2002) and his choreography in the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It examines but refutes the accusation that he has pursued a totalitarian or fascist aesthetic by looking closely at how the ‘digital multitude’ is represented in the film and the ‘mass ornament’ is manifested in the Olympics ceremonies. Ultimately, the mass spectacles organised by Zhang tell us more about the ‘harmony’ of contemporary China with globalised capitalism than about either totalitarian aesthetics or nationalist propaganda, and they demonstrate the logic of digital labour in a globalised economy.

  PublisherDOI

• POST–SOCIALIST REALISM IN CHINESE CINEMA

  Harvard University Asia Center eBooks · 2017-08-04 · 10 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Chinese Film Theory Reader

  2017-01-01

  article
  Publisher

• Realism

  Journal of Chinese Cinemas · 2016-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Post–Socialist Realism in Chinese Cinema

  Harvard University Asia Center eBooks · 2016-12-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Unreal Estate and China’s Collective Unconscious

  eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2014-03-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Apocalypse, or, the Logic of Late Anthropocene Ruins

  Cross-currents · 2014-03-01 · 11 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Sheldon H. Lu

  2 shared

• Chris Berry

  2 shared

• Victor Fan

  1 shared

• Zhen Zhang

  Tongji University

  1 shared

• Guo-Juin Hong

  Duke University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• McKnight Land Grant Professorship, University of Minnesota (…
• Institute for Advanced Study Fellow, University of Minnesota…
• Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellows…