Chinese Experimental Shorts
Li Zhenhua (translated by Beatrice Leanza)
Since the birth of the Chinese Media Movement in 1997, the hastened proliferating networks engendered a large group of new media artists that, unlike their predecessors, didn’t engage only with flat and static forms of art like oil painting, prints or sculpture. As the methods of communication rapidly transformed, people became comfortable with sending e-mailing and learning the uninterrupted computer configurations; they adapted in order to achieve the best results in production and broadcasting. Such a development is due to the influence of popularized technology that brought artists’ creations medium-related improvement and ease in perfecting. A body of dynamic works was created, influenced by artists of different backgrounds, individuals and companies, creating a chaotic yet stimulating contemporary art phenomenon. What follows are a few points on the classification and understanding of this new movement:
Interactive Images
The Bagu Ge – 8gg (Eight-legged Song) group is most representative of this category. They draw support from the present networking development for their interactive works; they continuously experiment with work production technologies to change the meaning of "artwork." Broadcasting News is a typical example: created under random circumstances; they gleaned samples from the TV program "Broadcasting News" that resulted from a processed conversion and reconfiguration of visual frequencies into audio ones, i.e. dance (now under experimentation). The characters appearing inside the video work represent the government media; they also recall a post 1976 past. Bagu Ge transforms this visual material, layered with political meaning and collective memory, into an almost dialogue-less dance track. The facial expressions in "pause" and "repeat" were imbued with humour, and music, once the meaning of the script was reconstructed, became one of the performance themes. Naturally what they want to highlight is this inversion of the relation between sound and image, but it is inside this new society, one accustomed to visual culture, that this inversion is inevitably endowed with more significance. Their website is like a fictional game machine similarly filled with amusing installations: by means of different modes of visual factors modification, audio effects can be changed. It is this subtle relation between visible and invisible sight that is at the base of their interactive works.
Cao Kai, Political Paste-up, 1969
Cao Kai recalls history and politics as a form of illusory remembrance common to many people born during the 60s and 70s. Although the mid 70s period of the Cultural Revolution already belongs to the past, its legacy has been imprinted in the generation of those born during the 90s.
Political Paste-up, a classical short video piece, is at once a rediscovery of this cultural movement of past China, and also a re-thinking of the influence that international concomitant historical happenings have had on Chinese youth. The piece runs through Brian Adams’s "Summer 1969," an explosive, live performance held in the summer of 1969 during Woodstock music festival while China was experiencing the fiery craze of the Cultural Revolution. The "leader" figure in this work is given an even bigger contemporary significance: one of political power (the leader’s will power, represented by Mao’s waving hand), another one related to the commercialization of popular culture (the fanatical scene of the galvanized crowd encouraged by an invisible singer). This editing technique–juxtaposing important facts of the same period one after the other–possesses a potent visual impact, particularly as we view the 70s in retrospect. Cao Kai’s works, generally within 7 minutes length, pull people back from contemporary society to a turbulent historical period, and by the obvious global changes brought to history under the globalization of ideologies, the artist has risen interrogatives and represented the past.
Documenting Experimentation:
Zheng Yunhan’s Sing with Me is an MV portraying the life of miners in Dongbei (north-east China), starting with the tune "We are strong workers," it documents the changes of this class from past until present, their social position and livelihoods. He uses a documentary style–editing from the mine landscapes to the facial close-up of the workers to the panoramas of the work fields; using a b/w picture frame. With special efficacy to a "northern style," the artist brings forth a comparison between his memories of hometown and the occurrences intrinsic to Beijing life. The visual reproduction of a fashionable old song from the 60s, and a style of remembering past times and old acquaintances gives scope and poignancy to the artist’s recount of his adolescence. "Documenting" is used as an aesthetic device.
Chinese Literati Images
Yang Fudong’s Backyard, extensively shown and widely praised, is a 12-minute long video piece realized on a traditional 16 mm film, which aesthetically conveys the stylistic inheritance of Chinese landscape painting. The pale and thin b/w images together with the strange movements and gestures of the characters, result in a bizarre picture of China, where most of the scenarios are set on the gardens and city views of Hangzhou and Shanghai.
Human Geography
The work by Ou Ning and Cao Fei, San Yuan Li, may be seen as a geographical excursion, in which the history of the human transformations inside the ever-changing Guangdong’s Zhusanjiao district is portrayed by means of four alternate visions, to a soundtrack of electronic music. The historical background of Sanyuanli unfolds, revealing the transformations developed in the new/old cities, places deprived of history. The work is experimental in its integration of VJ-like visual elements, electronic music, and in focus on geographical phenomenon.
Commercials"
Zhang Dan and Chen Man’s DANAM is a short piece of 1 min combining several of the basic elements of contemporary design–pictures, moving images, plane and 3D design. The work lacks a strong directionality. What differentiates DANAM from the works described above is its emphasis on the visual–though this may carry commercials characteristics, it differs from traditional advertisement, incorporating visual elements that are not easily accepted by the audience, like exposed, violent pictorial frames.
Animation Movies
Zhou Xiaohu’s work Beautiful Cloud uses animated characters to create a melancholic space, portraying his own anxieties, to formulate a new category for contemporary art. By integrating 3D animation and historical document samplings, he constructed one or multiple deepened spaces, and by the visual overlapping of the animation audience and the real audience, the viewers become the "viewed." In the montage, the adherence of the music to the lead of the plot depicts with compelling force the psychological history of an artist.
And More
Of course, there are others categories of short movies, which intermix, and blend the forms described above. Among these are the works of: Qiu Zhijie, Wu Ershan, and Shi Qing. The works included in this description don’t comprise the category of video art. Since the beginning of the 90s video art itself has found categorization in single/multiple channel video-forms and video installation, and has differed from the classification here presented: one is theme based, the other, "physics-related." Video art still lays its stress on art, and draws support from the display methods of contemporary media.
