Ann Lyuwenyu ZHANG 张吕文煜
What is Chinese independent media archaeology? Or rather, how can we critically engage with media archaeology as a method in the Chinese context, considering the history and practice of Chinese independent cinema? This is the central question guiding the 7th issue of the Chinese Independent Cinema Observer. Popularized by authors like Jussi Parikka, Thomas Elsaesser, and Wolfgang Ernst in the past decade or so, media archaeology has become a generative method for media scholars and artists alike to engage with past materials in order to better understand the present and the future (Parikka 2012, p. 2). Emphasizing the cultural and theoretical potential of technologies and archival findings, media archaeology is often characterized by the dynamics between the new and the old (Parikka 2012; Elsaesser 2016; Strauven 2021). This dialectical relationship is particularly resonant in the Chinese context, as it not only references the rapid cycles of new technologies since the introduction of the digital, but it also coincides with the early history of Chinese independent cinema during the economic reform and opening up in the late 1980s, a period when new ideas replace, renew, and negotiate with the old. However, the current discussion around media archaeology largely stems from a technologically-oriented and Euro-American perspective that sidesteps non-Western culture. To fill in this lacuna, this issue introduces scholarship and practices rooted in Chinese independent moving and still images to tease out the possibility of a localized point of view. The content of this issue builds on the history of Chinese independent cinema in the traditional sense but also expands its point of view to include multitudes of media materials ranging from imaging technologies like cameras and recording devices to found and remediated footage and photography, as well as archiving practices related to independent image-making culture.
Tracing the history of Chinese independent cinema, its early development is inevitably tied to the introduction of the handheld DV camera and other portable technologies in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Berry et al. 2010; Robinson 2013; Zhang & Zito 2015). Evidently, DV camera is not the only site of Chinese media archaeology found in independent filmmaking in the past thirty or so years. In fact, by examining various materials using media archaeology as a method, this issue reveals many hidden sites and intersections—for example, the repurposing of obsolete technologies seen in Cong Feng丛峰’s article —that gesture towards a renewed understanding of the history and culture of Chinese independent image-making. Up until today, Chinese independent cinema and image cultures have existed across multiple mediums, from celluloid to video cassettes like VHS and DV, and then to various computer-based digital formats prevalent today. Filmmakers, photographers, archivists, and curators have witnessed the transformation of media formats from analogue to digital, and experienced the democratization of filmmaking tools along with the proliferation of individually made images on smartphones and pocket-sized cameras. While there is a plethora of scholarship on the history and content of Chinese independent cinema, little concerns the production, preservation, and afterlives of these materials.[1]To fill in this gap, this issue foregrounds the history of the tools as an essential part of the history of the works.
It is important to note that, while it is tempting to write a genealogy of media materials in Chinese independent image culture, this issue goes beyond a simple historical overview. Historical accounts no doubt play important roles in the following articles, but the main goal of this issue is to—using Jussi Parikka’s words—offer ‘insight into how to think media archaeologically in contemporary culture’[2] (2012, p. 2). As such, many of the articles in this issue engage with past materials from a current standpoint to demonstrate the possibilities of reconsidering, destabilizing, and even disrupting the linear historical timeline, especially official narratives formulated after 1989, and direct our attention to examine the increasingly reduced public space for independent culture.[3]
This challenge to linear temporality is established in this issue through the key concept of obsolescence. It encompasses objects, technologies, and ideas that were left behind by the so-called ‘progress’, where the official image politics prioritizes a highly curated and technologically advanced Chinese visuality while supressing the rest. As a result, the concept of obsolescence is particularly worth elucidating in the Chinese context because independent film practices often actively engage with obsolete materials like found footage and older technologies in stark comparison to the clean-cut high-definition mainstream visual culture.[4] Characterized by opposing tendencies of ‘persistence’ and ‘suppression’, obsolescence foregrounds the material remains after the format is outdated and challenges the idea that the new often overpowers the old (Tischleder & Wasserman 2015, p. 2). Thus, obsolescence directs our attention to the clashing temporal energies in Chinese media cultures, especially how film technologies, materials, spaces, and ideas are reappearing and even resisting becoming obsolete.
What’s more, obsolescence is the key to understanding what Thomas Elsaesser calls ‘the initial impulse[s] of media archaeology’, which is to ‘make the past strange again rather than all too familiar’ (2016, p. 334). When a format is replaced by a newer update through the planned obsolescence of consumerism, the obsolete yet still present media/medium then become alternative routes to reconstruct memories fragmented and oppressed by the hegemony of the new and ‘good’ media. Engaging with obsolete materials stirs up dirt and resists the sedimentation of the past and asks: what is at stake when we salvage media materials that are no longer useful in the acceleration of Chinese modernity? In other words, this issue also proposes to view media archaeology as a form of social reimagination, and not just a way to elucidate the relationship between new and old media. Through this localized perspective, we can better understand how independent images[5] are complicated by the cycles of obsolescence, and how media archaeology as a method can decentralize Chinese image politics.
While this introduction has been trying to map media archaeology onto the history and culture of Chinese independent cinema, it certainly is not trying to fit past objects into any concrete narratives or frames. What’s more, it also acknowledges the debates surrounding media archaeology’s tendency towards technological determinism, thus downplaying the social structure of the topics in question (Skågeby & Rahm 2018). To steer away from such a tendency, this issue joins the stratagem introduced in Jörgen Skågeby and Lina Rahm’s ‘What is Feminist Media Archaeology?’ to keep on asking ‘other’ questions while engaging with media archaeology: ‘Who is winning and who is losing? Who made the rules? And what story do we tell the losers to get them to want to continue playing?’ (Skågeby & Rahm 2018, p. 14). Many of these questions ring true for the discussion of media archaeology in Chinese independent image culture in this issue. We may also add questions like: Why do independent filmmakers intentionally use outdated technologies? Who benefits from constantly updating not-yet-useless media? At its core, Chinese independent media archaeology is a methodology that is at once technical and social.
Going back to the question posed at the beginning, framing this introduction with the question ‘What is Chinese independent media archaeology?’ follows the mode of engagement through which many authors write about media archaeology, emphasizing the multiplicity and openness of the field.[6] Importantly, this open-ended question also signifies that this issue is in no way trying to present a comprehensive overview of the landscape of media archaeology and related practices in Chinese independent cinema; rather, we aim to pose questions and explore the diverse ways to apply media archaeological thoughts on materials, archives, technologies and concepts to offer new ways of seeing, and by extension, new ways of resisting capitalist progress. In other words, this issue of CICO tries to present and analyse sites of media archaeology found in the Chinese context, ranging from archiving family images and tracing diasporic video works to discussing 1980s television technologies, with perspectives from academics, archivists, artists, and filmmakers. What’s more, as a journal published by the Chinese Independent Film Archive (CIFA), the following articles join the diverse materials preserved at CIFA to become a site of media archaeology itself. By bringing together diverse narratives and examples, this issue strives to broaden the fields of both media archaeology and Chinese independent cinema to create meaningful intersections.
This issue of CICO is categorized into four sections.
Following the introduction, the first section, titled ‘Decentralizing Archives’, consists of academic and interview articles concerning the state of the moving image archives in contemporary China. As an important concept and often the basis for conducting media archaeology, the archive must be situated in the Chinese context, especially in relation to independent efforts of archiving. Writing as an archivist and an academic, Yizhou Wei 韦怡舟 gestures toward the possibility of a decentralized film preservation system using examples connecting Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA) and Xiamen University (XMU). From an artist’s perspective, Gu Xue’s顾雪 interview focuses on her endeavour in founding the FamilyLens Film Archive家庭影像馆, a community-oriented organization that aims to promote the preservation of family images in China and encourage everyone to document their family stories. Together, this section offers a glimpse of the moving image archiving practices in contemporary China to establish the base for the discussion of media archaeology in the following sections.
The second section, titled ‘Broadening Media Archaeology’, offers two academic case studies employing media archaeology as the method in Chinese and diasporic Chinese filmmaking. Lynette Qiuyang Shen沈秋阳explores the use of ‘bad images’ as generative aesthetic devices in the experimental filmmaking of two diasporic artists—Yin Chi-Jang 殷子静and Ouyang Peixuan欧阳霈萱—to disrupt the definition of authenticity and ‘Chineseness’ while expanding the parameter of Chinese independent cinema. Similarly talking about the aesthetic devices of moving images, Désirée Marianini’s article offers a theoretically-oriented textual analysis of Lei Lei’s 雷磊 Breathless Animals (动物方言2019) where the filmmaker reuses and reshapes found materials and archival recordings. Both articles engage with their subjects of analysis through perspectives informed by media archaeology and obsolescence, and demonstrate diverse ways to think media-archaeologically about Chinese independent image culture.
The third section, ‘Renew and Recycle: Voices from the Artists’, is formed under the generous personal accounts of the artists themselves. Among the four articles, two are in the form of director’s notes and two are group interviews. Director Cong Feng丛峰writes about his long-term filmmaking practice of ‘techno-scavenging’ using old technologies and found footage, and how this practice offers ‘a freedom available only at the margins’. Animator and director Lei Lei zooms in on a much-neglected aspect of independent filmmaking—the voice-over画外音—to think through the conceptual and physical implications of sound and images. The interview with the four members of the SWYC (Structure. Wave. Youth. Cinema) Working Group—Shi Jian时间, Chen Jue陈爵, Wang Zijun王子军, and Kuang Yang邝杨—goes back to the early days of Chinese independent cinema and provides never-before-seen accounts of the history of technologies in Chinese television stations and discusses the group’s composition of the Manifesto of the New Documentary Movement新纪录片运动宣言in 1991. The last interview in this section with Li Wei李维 and Liang Chen梁晨 centres around the artist duo’s ruin photography work, Dust and Scratches蒙尘与划痕, and their multi-media approach to reactivating found family photos and videos in the half-demolished living spaces in Wuhan. Overall, this section hopes to provide a diverse range of examples from artists working in different media and different time periods.
Lastly, this issue of CICO is excited to introduce a new section, ‘New Research on Chinese Independent Cinema’, which showcases timely research and findings on Chinese independent cinema that do not necessarily align with the current theme of the issue. In this issue, the authors engage with different aspects of Chinese independent cinema through academic case studies of two prominent filmmakers. In Pang Hong’s庞鸿 article, she uses Wang Bing’s王兵 film Three Sisters (三姊妹 2013) as a point of entry into the painterliness of Wang’s oeuvre with an art historical point of view. In the last article of the issue, Wendy Sun 孙晓雪 explores digital video activism and Queer Marxism in Cui Zi’en’s Withered in a Blooming Season (少年花草黄 2005).
Following the various possibilities discussed in this introduction, I want to end with yet another question borrowed from Thomas Elsaesser’s ‘Media Archaeology as Symptom’ and ask: ‘What is cinema (good) for?’ (Elsaesser 2016, p. 188). This question appears after Elsaesser delineates the possibility of media archaeology as ‘crisis management’ and highlights the current loss of faith in modern progress which led to ‘the crisis in history and causality, which has amplified into a crisis in memory and recall, reflected in turn in the crisis of narrative and storytelling (Elsaesser 2016, p. 188).[7] Granted these crises can be found in arguably every region across the world but it particularly rings true in the post-socialist and post-pandemic China, where histories, memories, and (grand-)narratives have long been intertwined and served pre-mediated. So what can we gain by asking ‘What is cinema (good) for?’ in relation to the sites of media archaeology presented in this issue? In the context of the increasingly diminishing space of the independent image culture in China, this issue on media archaeology and obsolescence is just an initial attempt to localize this methodology to gesture towards a socio-technologically informed, historically conscious, and reimaginable future of the study and practice of Chinese independent cinema.
Acknowledgement
This special issue of the Chinese Independent Cinema Observer has benefited greatly from the kindness and the advice of the general editors, Sabrina Qiong Yu余琼and Luke Robinson, who have spared no effort in the editing process to ensure the quality of each article. I also wish to thank the scholars, artists, archivists, and filmmakers who contributed so generously for this issue. Your hard work is what made this issue special.
References
Berry, Chris, Xinyu Lü, and Lisa Rofel. The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Hong Kong: University Press, 2010.
Elsaesser, Thomas. Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. Film Culture in Transition 50. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016.
——’Media Archaeology as Symptom,’ New Review of Film and Television Studies 14, no. 2
2016: 183, p. 188–92.
Ernst, Wolfgang. Technológos in Being: Radical Media Archaeology and the Computational Machine. New York, UNITED STATES: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2021.
Huhtamo, Erkki, and Jussi Parikka, eds. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2011.
Jucan, Ioana B., ‘Introduction: Remain × Remain(s)’ in Jucan, Ioana B., Jussi Parikka, and Rebecca Schneider, Remain. DE: meson press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.14619/1495.
Lu, Pan, and Bo Wang. “The Obsolete and The Resurrected: Archaeological Cinema in Asia.” Non-Fiction Journal 05 published February 2023 by Open City Documentary Festival. Accessed June 10, 2025. https://opencitylondon.com/non-fiction/non-fiction-05-the-obsolete-and-the-resurrected-archaeological-cinema-in-asia/the-obsolete-and-the-resurrected-archaeological-cinema-in-asia/.
Parikka, Jussi. What Is Media Archaeology? Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012.
Robinson, Luke. Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street. London ; Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Skågeby, Jörgen, and Lina Rahm. “What Is Feminist Media Archaeology?” Communication + 1 7, no. 1 (2018). https://doi.org/10.7275/fthf-h650.
Strauven, Wanda. Touchscreen Archaeology: Tracing Histories of Hands-On Media Practices. meson press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.14619/1860.
Tischleder, Babette B., and Sarah Wasserman, eds. Cultures of Obsolescence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463647.
Zhang, Zhen, and Angela Zito. DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. Critical Interventions. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015.
Notes
[1] One example of scholarships on Chinese media archaeology can be found in the 5th issue of the Non-fiction Journal published in 2023 by Open City Documentary Festival and edited by Pan Lu and Bo Wang. See link: https://opencitylondon.com/non-fiction/non-fiction-05-the-obsolete-and-the-resurrected-archaeological-cinema-in-asia/the-obsolete-and-the-resurrected-archaeological-cinema-in-asia/.
[2] Italicization from the original author.
[3] The crackdown on Chinese independent film culture has been happening since mid-2010 with the forced disappearance of festivals and institutions like Beijing Independent Film Festival 北京独立影像展and Li Xianting Film Fund 栗宪庭电影基金 and many more. The most recent example is perhaps the closure of Unicorn Image 独角放送室 in Guangzhou on March 2nd 2025. Unicorn Image is a local screening space for independent directors and an event space for film enthusiasts in Guangzhou. See their Instagram post about its closure: https://www.instagram.com/p/DGck6Z2x7Jj/
[4] See Qiuyang Shen’s article, ‘Bad Images as Diasporic Homes: Exploring Media Obsolescence
in Chinese Diasporic Filmmaking’ in the second section of this issue; and Cong Feng’s essay, ‘Acceleration, Surplus, Technological Scavenging, and Moving Image Recycling’ in the third section of this issue.
[5] As briefly mentioned earlier, this issue tries to expand the parameter of Chinese independent cinema to encompass more than just the film text. Using examples from this issue, the definition of ‘independent images’ can be seen as the savaging of old photographs in residential ruins in Li Wei and Liang Chen’s interview, or the filmic manipulation of family images in Lynette Qiuyang Shen’s article, just to name a few.
[6] See Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (2012); and Jörgen Skågeby and Lina Rahm, ‘What is Feminist Media Archaeology?’ in communication +1 Volume 7 (2018). These two works also demonstrate the progression of the field from a general evaluation of digital media to focusing on important sub-fields like feminist media archaeology.
[7] Italicization from the original author.