Saturday October 17, 2026
Expanding Vulgar, Liberating Beauty
In Vulgar Beauty, Mila Zuo theorizes Chinese feminine beauty as an affective and cinematic construction that challenges Western and colonial beauty standards. Using the vulgar and the Chinese concept of weidao (“flavor”) as analytic frameworks, Zuo examines how performances of beauty produce racialized, gendered, and cultural identities. Through figures such as Gong Li, Joan Chen, and Ali Wong, she shows how vulgar beauty becomes a taste of difference and offers a critical rethinking of aesthetic theory.
Zuo’s use of “flavor” also resonates with everyday and clinical language, where emotions are often described through taste, such as salty attitudes, sweet dispositions, and sour moods. Such metaphors draw attention to how embodied sensation shapes perception, offering a more nuanced way of registering affect.
In psychoanalytic clinical work, attending to these sensory dimensions can open onto subtle registers of experience, including dissociation, reverie, and connection, that may otherwise remain unarticulated. This is particularly salient in thinking about how “feminine figures” navigate competing Western and Eastern regimes of beauty and self-presentation. In this talk with Mila Zuo, we will consider how her account of the five flavors of beauty might inform clinical listening and interpretation.
Audience Q&A to follow.
Details
- Saturday, October 17
- 9am-1030am PST / 12pm-130pm EST
- Member discussion: 1030am PST / 130pm EST Member
- TAACP Members: Free
- Non-TAACP Members: $25-$60
- Virtual on Zoom
- All are welcome
- No recording will be available for this event
100% of the proceeds of this event will go to benefit Palestine Children's Relief Fund.
Femininities & Feminisms: A series
This event is part of TAACP's 3 part series on Femininites & Feminisms.
Dates for the other events. Details and registration forthcoming:
- Saturday September 12 9am PST / 12pm EST: Ordinary Disasters: A reading and conversation with Anne Anlin Cheng
- Thursday, November 12 530pm PST / 830pm EST: Title Tbd. w/ Amrita Narayanan, Mona Jain, and Christina Megill.
Special thank you to Aries Liao, Christina Megill, Euginia Paik, and Sien Rivera for their contributions to the series coming to fruition.
Speakers
Mila Zuo
Euginia Paik
Euginia Paik
Euginia Paik
Euginia Paik
Euginia Paik
Bios
Mila Zuo, PhD (she/her) is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC, as well as the Graduate Advisor for the Cinema & Media Studies graduate programs. She is the author of Vulgar Beauty, which won a best book award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Accompanying research can be found in Film-Philosophy Journal, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Celebrity Studies Journal, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Feminist Media Histories journal, and in various anthologies on contemporary cinema and media studies. In addition to her scholarly work, Zuo writes, directs, and produces narrative films, visual essays, documentaries, and music videos. Her short films have screened in international film festivals and universities, including Carnal Orient (2016) which premiered at Slamdance Film Festival, and her short narrative film Kin (2021), which was the recipient of the 2019 Oregon Media Arts Fellowship, and screened at HollyShorts Film Festival.She is currently in production on her first feature, a creative non-fiction film about her family entitled “Mongoloids.”
Euginia Paik, LCSW (she/her) trained in psychoanalysis at the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP) in New York City. She has been in private practice in Manhattan since 2010.
Frequently Asked Questions
All are welcome to attend. Asian and Asian American voices and experiences will be centered.
No. All are welcome to attend. The Center welcomes dialogue and collaborations with other disciplines, practitioners, and communities.
No, CEUs are not provided at this time.
No refunds are provided once registered.
No, this event will not be recorded.
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TAACP - The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis Foundation
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