UC San Diego

My research focuses on how feelings and thoughts about ethics are created or constructed with imagistic materials such as painting, photography, or film. While the matter of ethics has been deeply examined from the metaphysic point of view, relatively few have studied the subject by looking at the images themselves. My research methodology is to focus on visual materials in order to observe how ethics is involved in forming how we turn our gaze on others.

First, I trace Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, including its vast collection of images in the form of maps, histories, figures, and myths of the various regions in the Renaissance. Cosmographia was designed to help readers experience the divinity of God, which meant the absolute morality of the Renaissance, by seeing the diversity of God’s creations through images made by highly skilled artists of the era such as Holbein the Younger. In particular, I examine how Renaissance artists transformed the abstract idea of goodness into a realistic visual order of it through accurate depictions of the world as the creation of God; further, I trace how this accurate or realistic visual knowledge eventually weakened belief in morality, contrary to what these artists intended.

Second, in contrast to the Cosmographia, I examine Caesare Lombroso’s claim in the late nineteenth century that evil was innate, which he tried to prove scientifically with visual materials or evidence such as photography. I focus on El Atlas Criminal de Lombroso (The atlas of the criminal) along with L’uomo Delinquent (Criminal man), a visual atlas of immorality containing images of “bad” people such as prisoners, whom Lombroso predetermined to be the opposite of “good” citizens in order to support his theory.

Third, I trace how Lombroso’s imaginative science of criminality, coupled with people’s imaginary typological views of others flowing in cultural memory, was further refined through accurate, verifiable, and standardized procedural methods such as Alphonse Bertillon’s identification system. I focus on how these refined systems transformed the matter of ethics into technologies that can be processed massively and efficiently without the delays caused by emotional fluctuations associated with ethical conflicts.

Finally, I examine how the Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky in his film Solaris attempted to restore the old masters’ views from the Renaissance to contemporary society without relying on ethical emotion.