About the Iris Chang Studio

The Iris Chang Studio was founded on October 26, 2018, by Liu Yu, with the consent of Iris Chang’s parents and her husband. The studio takes no political position. Its only purpose is to keep Iris Chang’s work — and the moral demand carried inside that work — from being lost.

Liu Yu first encountered Iris Chang through the 2007 film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking, in which Olivia Cheng played her. The film, like the book before it, made one thing visible to him: that an entire history can be carried by a single voice, and that when the voice falls silent, the work of carrying it has to be picked up by someone else. Liu Yu assumed at the time that there were already professional teams doing this work — researchers, archivists, translators, the kind of institutional infrastructure a subject of this scale demands. When he discovered there were not, he founded the studio.

On September 22, 2022, the studio was formally registered in the United Kingdom.

Today the studio’s work is translation and preservation: bringing Iris Chang’s lectures and writings, in both video and text, to a wider readership and a wider listening public. The Chinese tradition has a phrase: “Words without form do not travel far.” We believe that words are the only place where the essence of a soul survives. This is our way of paying tribute to Iris Chang — of carrying her conviction forward, so that it may continue to reach hearts that have not yet heard it.

Photo: Liu Yu, the studio’s founder, with Iris Chang’s parents in Beijing.

We ask our readers to follow the studio’s work, and to bear witness, with us, to the spirit of Iris Chang. We undertake this work in modesty, and to the limit of our strength.