Zhi Luo is an MFA Candidate in the Design for Responsible Innovation program at UIUC. Grappling with her own political identities both as a Chinese expat and a foreign student in the United States, she found herself comparing the ways Chinese and US nationalism manifest in history and visual culture. She realized that while the two countries seem to be antithetical to each other, they use very similar rhetoric in nationalist propaganda. Observing nationalist and authoritarian media narrative in the US not only helped better understand propaganda in her home country, but also led to her research interest in nationalist rhetoric in visual culture. Luo’s MFA thesis is a design and visual history research on how image-making and visual designs shape national identity and nationalist rhetoric in the US. Luo’s exhibition is a collection of curated historical prints and critical designs in response to her research topic. By connecting components from both the past and the present, Zhi’s exhibition emphasizes that combing through historical media presents a new way for us to see visual rhetoric of the present and future new media.
