EPHEMERAL, VISCERAL: FEELING THROUGH FORM(LESS)

This dissertation explores the affective and material dimensions of artistic practice through the works of two emigrated Asian artists: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, originally from Korea, and Hung Liu, from China. Although their artistic languages are formally distinct, with Cha working in conceptual and intermedial forms and Liu in richly layered figurative painting, their practices come together in a shared concern with memory, diaspora, and gendered historical embodiment. Moving beyond identity-based or representational frameworks, this dissertation introduces affective intermediality as a methodological lens through which form, materiality, and historical consciousness become entangled. Drawing from feminist and queer affect theory, materiality studies, and postcolonial critique, the dissertation situates Cha and Liu within late 20th-century art historical discourse while rethinking how artistic encounter operates as a site of embodied knowledge. Cha’s fragmented, intermedial practice disperses affect across text, image, and body, emphasizing the absence, opacity, and historical residue that resonate with diasporic memory. Meanwhile, Liu’s materially rich and emotionally charged paintings transform archival photography into spaces of affective reckoning, reworking visual traditions such as socialist realism and colonial portraiture through formal strategies like dripping, layering, and spatial reactivation. Through close visual and textual analysis, the dissertation challenges dominant binaries of abstraction and representation, revealing how affect emerges not as expressive sentiment but as a critical, historically situated force. Their works resist assimilation into conventional art historical frameworks—whether the formalist logic of American modernism, the narratives of contemporary Chinese art, or the identity-based models of Asian American art discourse—occupying instead a space of interdisciplinary and cultural instability that creates affective mobility as a methodological tenet. By examining how Cha’s and Liu’s works convey the sense of ephemeral and visceral as embodied affect, this dissertation reorients art historical inquiry toward the politics of form and the epistemologies of sensation. It argues that their practices offer critical interventions into how art history conceptualizes medium, visibility, and aesthetic politics, ultimately positioning affect and material intimacy as central to rethinking the ethical stakes of artistic encounter in the wake of global migration, gendered racialization, and the persistent afterlives of colonial violence.