Zairong XIANG’s research, teaching, and curatorial practices engage with cosmology and cosmopolitanism in their culturally diverse, historically specific, and conceptually promiscuous manifestations in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuatl. Xiang has a cotutelle Ph.D. in comparative literature in 2013 from University of Tübingen and University of Perpignan with the European Union-funded Erasmus Mundus joint doctorate.

He teaches across the curriculum at the division of Arts and Humanities at Duke Kunshan University. Author of Queer Ancient Way: A Decolonial Exploration (punctum books), he is the editor of exhibition catalogues, journal special issues, and a film archive. He is currently completing his second book on “transdualism.” Through the concept of “shanzhai/counterfeit,” he continues multifaceted research into the artistic and intellectual exchanges in the Global South, especially between Latin America and China since the nineteenth century. Once a research fellow at the ICI-Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and a postdoctoral fellow of the DFG Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms at Potsdam University, he was twice the recipients of the EU Erasmus Mundus scholarship. As a curator, he has co-curated the 2021 Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021), Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, 2022), and the 14th Shanghai Biennial Cosmos Cinema (2023-2024). He has curated at Para-Site Hong Kong an exhibition titled How to be Happy Together? (2024 - 2025); and is co-curating (with Denise Ryner) a research and exhibition project on Afro-Asia at ICA Philadephia (2026).

All his writings and previous lectures could be accessed here: www.xiangzairong.com