Dr. TAO Yunzhu2026-06-292026-06-292026Tao, Y. (14 Mar 2026). National style, local flavor, and photographic cosmopolitanism: Photo pictorial and its transnational encounter across the Sinophone regions (1960s-1980s). Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference 2026, Vancouver, Canada.http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11861/27821This article explores the transnational history of Photo Pictorial (Sheying huabao 摄影画报), a Hong Kong-based Chinese-language magazine established with pro-PRC background to win over Chinese diasporas in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and the world during the Cold War. After traveling northward to mainland China for landscape photography in the 1950s, Chen Fuli 陈复礼 and a group of pro-leftist Hong Kong photographers (who were editorial board members of Pictorial) absorbed techniques from socialist documentary realism and integrated them with Western pictorialism. Inspired by the socialist aesthetics of Chinese “national style and form,” they also infused landscape and street photography with “local flavor” that reflects the everyday life of fishermen and laborers in Hong Kong in their aesthetic practices and editorial principles. To further enhance Pictorial’s inclusiveness and expand its global influence among overseas Chinese readers, the magazine published works by Southeast Asian Chinese photographers, notably K. F. Wong 黄杰夫. His ethnographic photography selected by the editorial board presented a humanized and thus “realistic” portrayal of Borneo women, thereby resisting the imperialist gaze of Western colonial photographers. The article contends that as a vital tool for the PRC’s soft propaganda overseas, Pictorial constructs a photographic cosmopolitan world that balances Chineseness, documentary realism, and Western pictorialism. It also reveals how Hong Kong photographers during the Cold War sought to claim their own subjectivity in their aesthetic practices by offering an alternative to pictorialism, while countering colonial influences across the Sinophone regions.enConference Paper