Cha is an English-language Hong Kong literary journal devoted to Asian arts and cultures. I wrote an article for their reviews section entitled "Johannes Schönherr's North Korean Cinema: Rise (and Fall?) (and Rise again?) of the Propaganda Machine", which was published on the journal's blog in October 2025.

This analysis of Johannes Schönherr's monograph, North Korean Cinema: A History, presents the approach and strengths of a book that is both a historical account of the film production of the Kim family's bizarre communist-monarchical dictatorship, a long series of critical summaries and contextualizations, and which also contains fascinating interviews with, among other people, defectors living in South Korea who recall their experiences as filmgoers while still living in the totalitarian environment they've fled since. The reading and analysis of Schönherr's work allows us to put into perspective the importance of the works of Shin Sang-ok, a South Korean filmmaker kidnapped by the regime and forced to make films in North Korea in the early 1980s, and, by contrast, the astonishing insignificance of the film treatise written by the cinephile dictator behind this story, Kim Jong Il. The German author's work also offers a striking panorama of the micro-evolutions and stagnations of a film production that remains fixed on its propagandistic fundamentals despite decades of global upheaval, and despite the aesthetic shock created, for a short period, by Shin Sang-ok's films.  

The article is available at this address:

https://chajournal.blog/2025/10/11/korean-cinema/

The page of the book North Korean Cinema: A History on the website of its publisher:

https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/north-korean-cinema/

Cha is an English-language Hong Kong literary journal devoted to Asian arts and cultures. I wrote, for their "reviews" section, an article entitled "Strange Beasts of China: Harnessing Zhiguai and Magic Realism to Satirise Othering" published on the journal's blog in November 2022.

This analysis of the contemporary fantasy novel Strange Beasts of China, by Yan Ge, examines the ways in which this series of tales set in present-day China, evoking various species of monstrous "beasts", and all intertwined in such a way as to reveal the secrets of the origins of the (human) (or is she, really?) narrator, borrows from zhiguai through some of its themes, to magic realism through its ambiguous treatment of the status of the supernatural, and to postcolonial discourse in the way it denounces otherning through the symbolic example of "beasts" and the way they are treated by humans.

The article can be read at this address: https://chajournal.blog/2022/11/16/beasts/

Strange Beasts of China's page on its publisher's website: https://www.tiltedaxispress.com/store/strange-beasts-of-china

Cha is an English-language Hong Kong literary journal devoted to Asian arts and cultures. I wrote, for their "reviews" section, an article entitled "Chinese Poetry and Translation: A Multi-Angled Overview of What Happens When Worlds Collide", published on the journal's blog in September 2022.

This long review of the collection of essays Chinese Poetry and Translation. Rights and Wrongs, co-edited by Lucas Klein and Maghiel van Crevel, presents the many issues explored in the book by authors from a wide variety of backgrounds (more or less all of them being poets, translators and scholars specializing in translation studies and/or Chinese literature), and which deal in turn with the influences of Russian, Anglophone, French or German-speaking authors on various Chinese poets, the cultural influence of classical Chinese poetry and the difficulties encountered by translators due to the extreme archaism of the Chinese language used in these ancient texts, of the internal, aesthetic and ideological struggles between the modern proponents of one school of poetry or another, of the approaches that a translator can adopt according to their culture and their personal experience, the place to be given to the culture and experience of the author of the source text, intellectual interactions between poetry, translation and theoretical commentary, etc.

The article can be read at this address:

https://chajournal.blog/2022/09/15/chinese-poetry-translation/

The book Chinese Poetry and Translation can both be purchased or read online for free from this address:

https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462989948/chinese-poetry-and-translation