Eternity, Purity, Curiosity.
– I’m an undergraduate at Universiteit Utrecht, BA: Media and Culture & Humanities Honours Programme ’27, a Chinese guy quite interested in transcultural studies and digital culture, while still figuring out the specifics. I’m also an ADHDer—you might notice it in the jumping logic and strange viewpoints within my essays.
– This slight-academic blog is currently made for the tutorial project of Honours Exploration Block 2, but I think I’ll keep it going after the course ends cause I kinda like free-writing. (Yes, I will pay 60 Euros per year for this…)
心如虚空容万物，性似琉璃照千江
Posts
“All at Once”
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Exploring the Contested Boundaries of Diasporic Chineseness in Mainland Chinese Discourse Introduction 2025 is the 750th anniversary of the founding of Amsterdam. As part of the celebrations, an educational book distributed to schoolchildren included a boardgame criticised as racist. In response, Chinese Dutch residents and international students organised a peace rally to advocate for respect…
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When you’re standing on the train platform waiting for the last train, and someone who is drunk or high on drugs is shouting loudly somewhere — at that moment, what kind of concerns will appear in your mind? In the past 2 years living in Utrecht, the Netherlands, I often have a weird thought of…
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Rethinking Cross-Boundary Aesthetic Resonance through Impressionist Arts I can’t tell if I like this essay or not—the brainstorming was fun, I like Impressionism a lot, and I really think this topic and case are insightful to discuss. I also wanted to try the argument structure of a “bouquet,” or cómo se dice a “Plan Thématique”…
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Name, Identity, and Subjectivity Name, as the unique symbol of every human being, is endowed with multiple meanings: family blessing, ethnic identity, the cultural rhetoric, and all of the memories that shape the self-identity and subjectivity during the growing process. It represents the image of us, makes us an individual in this world, although the…
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The Analysis of Influencer Dazhi: Why Does She Fail to Be Recognised as Resistance? This essay is the final assignment from the course “Gender, Intersectionality and Cultural Critique” (YES I FINALLY GOT THE GRADE FOR THIS ESSAY) This is a theoretical reflection of “The Queer Art of Failure” & case study of a Chinese influencer.…
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An Autoethnography of Rethinking the “Normal” in Media and Cultural Studies This essay isn’t perfect by any means—some quotations were added just to meet requirements, and I’m still figuring out how autoethnography actually works. But as my first Honours Exploration piece, I’m happy to share it as the opening post of this blog. It reflects…
Lavio Rens 
