Bingfeng, Dong. "Cinema of Exhibition: Film in Chinese Contemporary Art: In conversation with Tianqi Yu Translated by Hui Miao." China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu and Luke Vulpiani. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 73–86. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501300103.ch-004>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 10:59 UTC. Copyright © Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, Luke Vulpiani and Contributors 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 4 Cinema of Exhibition: Film in Chinese Contemporary Art Dong Bingfeng In conversation with Tianqi Yu Translated by Hui Miao Dong Bingfeng is regarded as one of the most active curators and art critics working on Chinese contemporary art and visual culture in mainland China today. In the past eight years he has worked at several different contemporary art museums, including the Guangdong Art Museum, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art and Iberia Center for Contemporary Art. At these leading art institutions, he explored the nature and ontology of the ‘moving image’ in its various forms – video art, new media art, video and film installations – pushing the boundaries of the various forms and decon- structing the moving image culture. Currently, Dong is the artistic director at the Li Xianting Film Fund, where he has implemented an intensive exploration into artists’ films shown in gallery spaces, or what has been recently referred to as ‘cinema of exhibition.’ China’s iGeneration co-editor Tianqi Yu interviewed Dong Bingfeng on the emerging field of ‘cinema of exhibition,’ and in the interview Dong shares some of his views on cinema and moving image culture, particularly among China’s current iGeneration. **** Tianqi Yu: As a curator, art critic, and the current artistic director at Li Xianting Film Fund, can you please introduce the kinds of projects Li Xianting Film Fund is involved in, and what your engagement with moving image curation is at this organization? Bingfeng Dong: Since taking over at Li Xianting Film Fund, my work is naturally integrated with the agenda of the Film Fund in the area of independent films and documentaries, especially in terms of research and film festival curation. Chinese contemporary art and independent film have been purposefully 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 73 14/04/2014 09:12 74 China’s iGeneration put together as an important combination through which to explore the interrelatedness and differences of these two moving image cultures. In China’s specific social and political environment, the Li Xianting Film Fund mainly focuses on four areas of work: film archiving, research and publications, developing our film academy, and promotion of film festivals. In recent years, the Film Fund has been under great pressure from official state control. Recently, a large number of the established public film events have been either called off or prohibited from taking place, which has forced us to consider focusing our future work on two main areas: film archiving, and research and publications. These seemingly static and interior areas can in fact be a very effective way to support the Film Fund’s academic direction and influence, especially in terms of expanding the space and nature of the exhibition, as well as attracting new resources to foster international cooperation, which remains very important for the future existence of the Film Fund. In 2012, the Film Fund published a book series on film directors, showcasing works by moving image artists who have experience in multiple creative fields in film and contemporary art, such as Tsai Ming-liang from Taiwan, Yang Fudong from China, and Raqs Media Collective from India. This will become our primary research focus and theme for the year 2013. Yu: How is the artist film being accepted by young Chinese filmmakers today? Dong: Currently in China – apart from the Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival, which focuses on documentaries – experimental films have been introduced to major independent film festivals in Beijing, Chongqing and Nanjing. The idea is to encourage and attract more artist films and short films with a stronger artistic quality to participate in these platforms each year. In 2010, the China Independent Film Festival in Nanjing invited me to plan a display unit on the subject of creation and presentation of Chinese contemporary art and film. Artists such as Wang Jianwei, Cao Fei, Zhou Xiaohu, Sun Xun, and other important moving image artists were invited to attend the event. Such an event was not a coincidence. In 2001, a few minjiang (grassroots) film groups in China jointly organized and launched China’s First Unrestricted New Image Festival. The winner of the experimental film category was Yang Fudong who was, and still is, a famous moving image artist, rather than a director active in theatrical film like Jia Zhangke. Similarly, the film festivals that were initiated by our Film Fund specifically include artist films within the competition in the experimental film category, outside traditional documentary and feature film categories. Yu: As an emerging visual practice, cinema of exhibition has been attracting attention from a growing number of artists, curators, critics and scholars. How do you define the concept of cinema of exhibition? When was it first accepted in China and how long has it been practised by Chinese artists? Can you trace the development in the past ten years for us? 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 74 14/04/2014 09:12 Cinema of Exhibition: Film in Chinese Contemporary Art 75 Dong: The earliest discussions of cinema of exhibition can be traced to Taiwan rather than the mainland of China. In 2006, Pompidou Arts Centre organized an exhibition in Taiwan, showcasing a large collection of new media art. In this exhibition, the concept of cinema as an important concept for moving image practice was translated into Chinese and introduced to the Chinese language world. In 2007, after Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s filmic installation work, It is a Dream, was submitted to the Venice Biennale, the concept of ‘cinema of exhibition’ was explored by some critics in Taiwan. In mainland China, four curators – Huang Chienhong from Taiwan, Du Qingchun and Zhu Zhu from mainland China, and myself – co-sponsored and planned the project ‘Looking Through Film: Traces of Cinema and Self-constructs in Contemporary Art’ at Shenzhen’s OCT Contemporary Art Theatre in 2010. It was the first time in China that the ‘artists’ film’ was included in the discussion of the historical context of contemporary art in China and Taiwan in the last three decades. In recent years, cinema of exhibition has become a very important form of creative expression and an innovative display of moving image in galleries and biennials in China. Compared to ‘video art’ and ‘new media art’ that have been accepted and integrated by museums and art critics, cinema of exhibition embraces a broader research level and thematic framework in terms of history, culture, politics and aesthetics. It is like a new subject in the creative production and exhibition of contemporary art. It is at this cultural crossroad that ‘cinema of exhibition’ has come into being. For example, in Luc Vancheri’s study of ‘contemporary film,’ the obvious focus is the transformation of a concept from ‘film’ to ‘installation.’ But for Chinese contemporary art, the way films enter the space of art museums and galleries not only symbolizes a new combination of temporality and aesthetics, but also breaks the viewing experience that is led by other forms of visual art on display at art galleries. On a second level, the major shift from the screening of films at cinemas to the projection of moving images in exhibition spaces has liberated images from the confines of the theatre and offers more possibilities of future film. Just as Godard said, ‘Film is no longer the prisoner of the movie theatre.’ Yu: What is the connection between cinema of exhibition and video art and independent film? In other words, what kind of different positions does the artists’ ‘cinema of exhibition’ have in Chinese moving image creative production and Chinese contemporary art? Dong: The emergence of Chinese video art occurred almost in the same period of the early 1990s as Chinese independent film. Furthermore, artists and film directors insisted upon strict distinctions in each other’s work, which was an important phenomenon in the 1990s. In addition to making standard video art, many artists were also making documentaries and even working on fiction films, while some independent film directors also began to 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 75 14/04/2014 09:12 76 China’s iGeneration explore a more open-ended filmmaking that is clearly indebted to artistic experimentation. The 1990s was a very open period for moving image creation. One could say that there was an endless stream of styles and genres that were influencing and interacting with each other. Performance art, video art and installation art are increasingly the central mainstay of Chinese contemporary art, compared to more traditional artistic media, including painting and sculpture. The emergence of video art started as a challenge to the museum classification principle. In the trend of ‘internationalization’ of Chinese contemporary art after the 1990s, contemporary video art and artist films became more well-known within the international art world. Yu: Can you give us some examples of Chinese artist films shown at international art biennales or on film festival circuits? Dong: For example, in Kassel, Germany, the Documentary series in 1997 and 2002 saw three Chinese artists invited to participate, whose main creative approach was the melding together of moving image, documentary and film to great effect and critical acclaim: Wang Jianwei (documentary ‘Living Elsewhere’), Feng Mengbo (multimedia interaction work ‘Family Album’), and Yang Fudong (film ‘An Estranged Paradise’).