Olivia Khoo is Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. She is the author of Asian Cinema: A Regional View (Edinburgh U Press, 2021), The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity (Hong Kong U Press, 2007), and co-author (with Belinda Smaill and Audrey Yue) of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (Lexington, 2013). Olivia is also co-editor of four volumes: The Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia (with Larissa Hjorth, 2016), Contemporary Culture and Media in Asia (with Daniel Black and Koichi Iwabuchi, 2016), Sinophone Cinemas (with Audrey Yue, 2014), and Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (with Sean Metzger, 2009). Her essays have appeared in leading international journals including Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Asian Studies Review, Feminist Media Studies, Camera Obscura, Screening the Past, and GLQ.
This paper considers the warehouse (and cinematic and artistic representations of the warehouse) as a space of intermedial potential. In the first part of the paper, I consider Amazon’s arrival in Asia as a multi-platform site that has shaped new practices of media consumption through its digitization and distribution of media throughout the region. In the second part of the paper, I examine representations of the factory and the warehouse as spaces of creativity and potential in media objects as diverse as Chloe Zhao’s docu-fiction Nomadland (2020), Cao Fei’s video works Whose Utopia? (2006) and Asia One (2018), and Corrie Chen’s short film Tinseltown (2016). The warehouse facilitates the trans-border exchange of goods (specifically, media), yet these flows are uneven in their distribution. It has been embraced by local centres at the same time as it has been met with resistance, both in industrial and political terms and through artistic practice. This paper explores how intra-Asian imaginations of the warehouse visualise new forms and processes of digital and creative labour that both dis-intermediate but also re-mediate assemblages of intermedial potential.