By
Zichen Yin
MA Material and Visual Culture
Instructions for Becoming Modern is a visual essay in the form of a fictional manual built from late Qing and early Republican image archives, including studio portraits, colonial and anthropometric photographs, tabloid illustrations, and newspaper images. The work interrogates the visual politics of Chinese modernity embodied in the Manchu queue, from means of state sovereignty to colonial re-signification and its uneasy afterlives. It actively engages with the queue as a visual and semiotic field where different forms of historical pain converge: conquest, obedience, humiliation, racial typology, bodily discipline, reform, and the uneasy demand-desire to become modern.
References
Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. Venus in Two Acts. Duke University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. ‘The Age of the World Picture’ In The Question Concerning Technology. Harper and Row: 115– 154.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2004. ‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order.’ In Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, edited by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, 442– 60. Routledge.
Rhoads, Edward J. M. 2000. Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861– 1928. University of Washington Press.
Steyerl, Hito. 2011. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File. Video (colour, sound).
Zeitlyn, David. 2008. ‘Life– History Writing and the Anthropological Silhouette.’ Social Anthropology 16 (2): 154– 71.
This piece is a response to Temporalities, the theme of our 2026 print issue, which you can read here.
Anthropolitan 