Chenru Xue is a visual culture scholar and PhD researcher in Landscape Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Her interdisciplinary academic background spans visual culture (M.A., Lund University), digital media arts and journalism (B.A., Communication University of China), and her research focuses on how landscapes are shaped and understood through visual representation, discourse, and embodied experience.

Chenru Xue's research interests lie at the intersection of visual culture, spatial theory, and media representation, with a particular focus on how ideological and affective forces shape the perception of landscapes. She is especially drawn to the Arctic as a contested site where geopolitical narratives, cultural imaginaries, and environmental discourses converge. Her work interrogates how visual technologies from documentary film to digital games mediate the experience of space and contribute to the symbolic construction of place.

Informed by psychoanalytic theory and critical geography, she explores the tensions between representational and non-representational understandings of landscape, emphasizing the importance of absence, loss, and the unspeakable in shaping spatial meaning. Her interdisciplinary approach is attentive to both the semiotic structures of imagery and the lived, sensory encounters that often escape formal representation. She is also interested in how cross-cultural perspectives, particularly from East Asia, reinterpret established visual conventions in depicting nature and territory.

Through her research, Chenru investigates the ways power, identity, and memory are encoded in landscape narratives—especially those produced in transnational, postcolonial, and ecocritical contexts.

Eastern art; Chinese paintings; landscape and visual culture in digital era