Stream
The film 'In Her Time' by Diane Severin Nguyen posits practice as performance. The artist / actress skips through personal memory and collective history, with rehearsal as a means to confront trauma and the re-enactment of pain an end to expression. The narrative relays a struggle and ultimately a convergence between the private world of her nostalgically lit and soundtracked bedroom and the production of her character in a war movie filmed at Hengdian Film and Television City. Themes of historical narratives, violence, and desire are explored in the repetitive loops of her spoken lines and circular experiences.
Four advertisements from the early 20th century, Paris. Especially noticeable are the cartooned figures of military prowess, choices of maroon, grey, and off-white, array of carefully picked, carefully set fonts, and classical figures representing war and peace in the backdrop - visual codes that are foreign yet refreshing to the Chinese eye. A portrait of the city's morale and eco-political mental space in between the two world wars - the liminal space of peace, powered by intellectual, artistic engines of development and modernization. Snapped from the two-floored exhibition of Paris Modern: 1915-1945 (Power Station), an exhibit that invites viewers to compare modern Paris with 20th century Shanghai while reflecting on modernistic diversity, how "humanities and the arts" contribute "to a city's historical transformation."
Fishermen on Suzhou Creek. In summers past, children would try to grab a watermelon from the barges bringing produce, according to local residents.
'Traveling in the Dark', an art project conceived by film director, poet, writer, anthropologist, sound composer, literary and art theoretician, Trinh T Minh-ha, specifically designed for Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. It is a visual, sonic, poetic and philosophical experience that explores themes around “reality”, re-representation, and knowledge production. Excerpts from her writings were "exhibited", complementing her experimental film essays shown in makeshift dark rooms. "The unknown, like the fantastic, is never merely out there," she writes. In what way can the dark open up spaces of unsuspected visibilities, of active resistance and of solitary connivances? "It is always already here, there, where one neglects to look with eyes wide shut."
New Man 新人 by 商亮 at Made In Gallery. These large-scale paintings recall the super strength mode of an Anime transformation sequence and for me raise comparisons about current online discourse about hyper masculinity and identity.
