After more than two and a half years of discussion with Chinese artists, musicians, writers, bloggers, performers, filmmakers and arts professionals, about everything from yaogun to blogging to queer film, Artspace China is wrapping up the conversation here.

Thanks to all those who’ve been involved as readers, guest authors and interviewees. It’s been great talking to you!

The website will remain as is until the beginning of 2014, so all archives will be available until then. Artspace China’s Facebook page will keep chugging as well, keeping our presence online with regular posts of contemporary Chinese film, art, literature and music news.

Any further iterations of the Artspace China project (yes, there are possibilities) will be announced at the Facebook site as well, so keep your eyes peeled.

Until such time, happy travels, take care, and …

慢走!

For many in contemporary China, the past is another country – and a hazy, dimly lit one at that. It’s not uncommon to meet young people in China who can recite every dynasty in the nation’s 5,000 year history, yet can barely muster more than a few lines about the Maoist era of the 1950s and 60s. Independent documentarian Hu Jie was no different – by his own admission he knew little about China’s recent past when he stumbled upon the story of the dissident Lin Zhao, executed in 1968 for her outspoken criticism of Mao’s totalitarian ways. As Hu travelled the length and breadth of China looking for those who knew Lin, he felt like he had “found the door of history, opened it and walked in.” The stories he uncovered have been fuelling his filmmaking ever since.

In August two of Hu Jie’s best-known works, Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul (2004) and Though I Am Gone (2006) will screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival, as part of the program “Street Level Visions: Chinese Independent Docos”. This is a rare chance for Australian audiences to see some of the most challenging films coming out of contemporary China.

Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul uses interviews with many of Lin’s friends and associates to trace the young writer’s journey from an ardent supporter of Mao’s revolution to an impassioned dissident imprisoned in Shanghai. When she was denied writing materials in jail, Lin composed thousands of words of essays and poems using her own blood. Though I Am Gone tells the story of Bian Zhongyun, the deputy headmistress of a prominent Beijing girl’s school attended by many daughters of the party elite, who was beaten to death by her own student in the opening weeks of the Cultural Revolution in August 1966. Incredibly, Bian’s husband secretly photographed the events leading up to her death and his wife’s battered corpse – images he reveals to Hu Jie’s lens in the course of recounting his wife’s story.

In March 2010 I was privileged to interview Hu Jie via phone at his home in Nanjing for an article in RealTime. It’s an indication of the enduring sensitivity of China’s Maoist past that our conversation was interrupted by police monitoring Hu’s calls. Nevertheless, he persisted with the interview, and I’d like to thank him for taking the time and associated risks to speak to me.

To celebrate the screening of Hu Jie’s films in Melbourne this August, ArtSpace China presents the full 2010 interview for the first time. Thanks to my translator during the interview, who has asked to remain anonymous.

In addition to being an artist, curator and writer China’s cultural renaissance man Ou Ning is also an acclaimed documentary filmmaker. After making the experimental San Yuan Li in 2003 with Cao Fei and other members of the U-theque collective in Guangzhou, Ou Ning relocated to China’s capital, where he made Meishi St (2006) about the demolition of one of Beijing’s oldest areas in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics.

Meishi St will play in the Street Level Visions: Chinese Independent Documentary program screening as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) next month (see previous post), and Ou Ning will be in town for post-film Q&As and other public appearances.

To time with this event, we are reproducing this interview conducted by film writer and curator of the Street level Vision program, Dan Edwards, first published on the dGenerate Films website. Originally held in March 2010, the discussion contains a wealth of fascinating material not only on Ou’s background, but also the rise of China’s “digital” documentary generation.

Thanks to Ou Ning for his time and for speaking so openly about some controversial matters, and to Edwards and dGenerate for the piece. The interview was conducted mostly in English.

For the lucky ducks in Melbourne …

This year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) includes a special program of films selected from the past decade of China’s digital documentary boom. Curated by Dan Edwards, ‘Street Level Visions: Chinese indie docos’ cuts through the clichés of nightly news bulletins to show us China from the ground-up, through the eyes of some of the nation’s bravest filmmakers.

The program includes landmark films such as Zhao Liang’s Petition, Ou Ning’s Meishi Street, Hu Jie’s Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, and the more recent Besieged by Waste by Wang Jiuliang, among others. Filmmakers, Ou Ning and Wang Jiuliang will also be in town for post-film Q&As and other events.

See the MIFF website for more on the films and session times. And spread the word.

I was I was recently asked to join Down: Indie Rock in the PRC director Andrew Field for a post-screening Q&A session at the North by Northeast (NXNE) Festival in Toronto. The film follows Field’s explorations through the music scene in 2007. The host of the afternoon, the festival’s film programmer, used the word “revelatory” on several occasions to describe the impact Field’s film had on him and could have on potential audiences. That’s definitely something I was ready for: The number one reaction I get when I tell people that I’ve written a book on Chinese rock music is confusion. That there might be such a thing is not something that crosses your average mind. And let me be clear: I’m not surprised that this is the case.

But every so often, I get thrown for a loop when I experience this disconnect.

James Bradley’s television documentary, Ochre and Ink, hinges on a remarkable premise. A Chinese landscape painter, Zhou Xiaoping, becomes fascinated with the traditions and Australian Aboriginal culture and develops a 23 year long relationship with its artists in outback Australia. Zhou is accepted by various local Aboriginal communities, gradually learns their painting techniques, and ultimately ends up collaborating with some of indigenous Australia’s most highly regarded artists and historians.

The most remarkable thing about all this though is just how remarkable that premise is: that a Chinese artist might be so fascinated by Aboriginal Australia, and that China and Aboriginal Australia could find a point of common purpose. These two cultures aren’t generally put together, and our surprise at the fact that they might be reveals all kinds of racial stereotypes and presumptions.

As Aboriginal historian, Marcia Langton, says in the film: ‘There’s a view that any collaboration between an Aboriginal artist and a non-Aboriginal artist is somehow suspect. They want to somehow exclude Aboriginal people altogether from modernity.’ And as linguist Murray Garde goes on, ‘Chinese people are not allowed to be interested in other cultures; they’ve just got to stay on this side of the line.’

Ke Dingding and Guo Jing are not your typical independent Chinese filmmakers. They don’t live in Beijing; their films aren’t explicitly political; and they’re not distributed by the New York indie operation, dGenerate Films. Far from living beneath the radar, Ke and Guo have day jobs at Shanghai TV, and make their own independent docos on the side. Intelligent, personal and often profoundly sad, these documentaries are a reminder of the diversity of Chinese independent filmmaking: it’s not only the underground DIY crew who demonstrate courage and a critical eye.

At Shanghai TV, Ke and Guo have made programs about celebrity blogger, Han Han, and the much-admired dancer, and transgender role-model, Jin Xing. In their own time, however, they make intimate films about everyday people in contemporary Shanghai, often focussing on the pressures Chinese society puts upon its children.

In October 2008, photographer Wang Jiuliang began a project investigating waste disposal in and around Beijing. Following the trucks that collected his daily rubbish, he discovered eleven large-scale refuse landfills scattered around the close suburbs of the city, each one growing daily alongside the skyscrapers, housing developments, and general urban boom that surrounded them.

Beyond this, Wang also uncovered an underground industry in which rubbish was being removed from the inner city and taken to hundreds of illegal dumpsites around the urban fringe. Here, people were making their homes and their living, building houses from discarded construction materials, wearing clothes they had gleaned in the trash, and making their dinners from the city’s food scraps. They raised pigs on leftover organic matter. Local shepherds brought sheep and cattle to graze between the bottles and plastic bags.

From Cao Fei’s entre to the art world in the late 1990s she was pitched as ‘new generation’—a representative of the much needed next wave of artists to carry on from the theoretical dilemmas (and hype) generated around the contemporary Chinese artists who had preceded her. Drawing on the languages of pop and youth cultures, she signified a new voice on Chinese society, one that was savvy with globalisation and could comment on Chinese consumerism with the tools of the system itself.

More than 10 years on, Cao Fei is astoundingly accomplished, having spent the greater part of her 20s engaged in elaborate experiments with multimedia, collaborative performance pieces and deep explorations into the world of virtual reality. While primarily a video artist, Cao Fei’s interest in theatre has extended her work to the stage, often toying with the distinction between the digital and the real. Films inspired by the cultures of hip hop, pornography and gaming have given verve to her artistic vocabulary; meanwhile her cool eye is manifest in a number of shrewd documentaries. Cao’s works have been included in biennales around the world and dozens of catalogues and compendiums include essays under her name.

On Friday night I attended the opening of the Beijing Queer Film Festival in a gay bar in Beijing’s Gulou bar district. Held biannually, the festival is now in its tenth year, and still thrums with all the intensity of an underground, emergent community. The bar on Friday night was packed, and filmmakers invited from around the world spoke of a time when their own country’s queer community had the same sense of adversity and purpose.

The next day I spoke with the festival’s executive director, Yang Yang, a clear-thinking woman who has been the backbone of the festival since its inception. Yang is neither gay, nor a filmmaker, and so her commitment to Beijing’s queer community is intriguing.

Yang Yang’s preface to the festival program is a beautiful piece of writing that suggests some of the ongoing complexities behind identity – sexual or otherwise. Below is my discussion with Yang about her ten years running the festival, and the potential of film to communicate difference.