This launch exhibition aims to present the dimensions and spirit of Chinese independent cinema, which emerged in the late 1980s and has been marginalised in China’s cultural landscape by state censorship and film commercialisation. Chinese independent cinema functions as a dynamic force that challenges the construction of concepts of art, truth, history, reality, and ethics in official discourse, and explores alternative spaces, places, memories, voices, and images that have been ignored or distorted in mainstream media.
Through the participation of three representative independent filmmakers, Hu Jie, Wen Pulin, and Zhang Zanbo, the exhibition offers a glimpse into the origins of independent filmmaking in China in the 1980s, and Chinese independent filmmakers’ persistence in uncovering history and confronting reality. By showcasing eight new video works from these three filmmakers, along with their diverse artistic work, such as woodcuts, paintings, photos, and installations, and a range of valuable historical documents and items (many of them shown in public for the first time), we invite visitors to observe this fast-changing country through an independent lens.
The Great Earthquake: The Beginning of Independent Filmmaking in China
《大地震》:中国独立影像创作之先声
WEN Pulin, writer, director and art critic. In the 1980s, he set up the ‘China-America Drama Club’ at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, initiated and joined forces with teachers and students from eight art schools in Beijing to set up the ‘Beijing Student Art Troupe’, and planned a large-scale avant-garde art event at the Mutianyu Great Wall in the autumn of 1988. From the mid-1980s, he began to document underground rock music and avant-garde art activities in Beijing, and in the 1990s he continued to participate in and document the process of contemporary art in China through video. The Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art (a video archive) was established in Cornell University and the University of California San Diego from 2005 to 2007.
Since the late 1980s, Wen Pulin had been using visual documentation to tell the story of Tibet and to record the changes in Tibet over 20 years. In the last decade or so, Wen has travelled around the Himalayas, meditating and writing. His video works include The Great Earthquake (1984-1989, incomplete), “Qingpu – A Sacred Place for Ascetics” (1992), Damu Sky Burial Platform (1992), and China Action (2016). He has published books such as ‘Wind Horse Flag Book Series’, Drifting in Jianghu (2000), and Meeting the Living Buddha of Bajaj (2002); major exhibitions include ‘Seven Sins’, ‘Liberation’, ‘China Action’, ‘Through Death’, ‘Datong Dazhang’, and ‘Wen Pulin Chinese Avant-Garde Art Archive Exhibition of the 80s and 90s’.
In Search of Her Soul: Journey into a Hidden History
寻找她的灵魂：通往被遮蔽的历史
Hu Jie, independent documentary filmmaker, painter, and print artist. Born in 1958 in Ji Nan, Shandong, Hu Jie joined the Air Force of the People’s Liberation Army in 1977 and served for 15 years before leaving the army in 1992. In the following year, he went to the Yuanmingyuan Artist Village in Beijing to engage in painting, and started making independent documentaries in 1995. He has produced 34 independent documentaries so far.
Hu’s early works focus on the reality of marginalised artists and the underprivileged, such as his first documentary Artists of Yuanmingyuan (1995), Remote Mountains, a 1995 film on the lives of coal miners, and Folk Songs on the Plains (2003), a documentary on trafficked women. But more widely known are his historical documentaries, such as In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul (2005), Though I am Gone (2007) and Spark (2013). Hu Jie tirelessly uses film to explore the taboo history of the Mao Era, and to uncover the forgotten historical figures in turbulent political movements such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution. Due to the sensitive nature of his subject matters, most of his documentaries cannot be circulated, and the works he completed in recent years are completely unknown.
Hu Jie has created a substantial body of paintings and woodcut prints, and has held several solo printmaking exhibitions in Paris since 2018.
Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On: Falling Sky/Spring Hill/Green Lands
不过都是造梦的材料：天降/春山/绿地
