Wang Tuo

Wang Tuo’s The Northeast Tetralogy (2017-2021) is a multi-year video series that takes northeast China as an entry point, starting with the May Fourth Movement in 1919, spanning the eras of Sino-Japanese war and WWII (Manchukuo), Chinese civil war, post-war People’s Republic of China, current social events, and an imagined near future. In addition to his fieldwork and research into historical events, Wang appropriates and incorporates Chinese ghost stories, folk tales, and legends. The artist creates entangled narratives that develop and converge in a disoriented multisensorial matrix, defying the linear and causal practices of progression, temporalizing, and historiography. For the filmmaker, ghosts act as a parallel narrative for the archive of history. Embracing this uniquely Chinese hauntology, Wang proposes a notion of “pan-shamanization”, wherein physical bodies of people become the medium of historical consciousness.

In Symptomatic Silence of Complicit Forgetting, a writer in blockage, and a silently ruminating wife. They live in the same room, but each absent-mindedly inhabit their own worlds attempting to complete unspeakable trauma in the past. Ghosts literally live side by side with the living in this contemporary Chinese family. In another timeline, the writer, as a young Red Guard, mistakenly entered a study room full of abandoned manuscripts, and immersed himself in the reading of an old story. Jolted by the noises of a march outdoors, he bursted out into the open field. This is an archetypal story that runs deeply in Chinese memory, far away yet close by, and even till now, imperceptible pain hides quietly in our contemporary reality.

In Forms of Forgetting, German scholar Aleida Assmann proposes a kind of complicit forgetting, that is when the system attempts to erase certain memories in the past, and their victims accordingly manifest a traumatic silence. These two silences add up to a mutual complicity. Just as the writer in the film could not heal his deep wound through writing, those who share the same historical trauma similarly fall into a collective silence. This silence becomes symptoms that are unspeakable, chronic, and transferred to our present relationships.

A series of sketches are created based on the pertinent themes and imagery that arose from the research and production processes of Symptomatic Silence of Complicit Forgetting. Titled The wedding, Burning books, Magic show, Nine phases, Study and Criticism, these sketches source their imagery and style from archival images, classical mythological illustration, and lianhuanhua (comic strips) from the Cultural Revolution era.

The Interrogation is a video constructed entirely from still film photography and photomontage along with a voiceover. The work intricately intertwines two narratives. One comes from a local officer from the Commission for Discipline Inspection, who talks about the psychological tricks he used in his own job interview and subsequent interviews as he interrogates suspects in his field of work. The other narrative is a short story adapted from Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), wherein an actress who lapses into silence convalesces with the help of a nurse. The two women find themselves experiencing a reversal of circumstances, as one starts to speak again and the other stops. The two narratives expose the hidden structure in our seemingly mundane communications, a dialectical movement capable of inversions and convergences.

By generating performance within an improvisational scenario, Roleplay discusses how artificial concepts, such as “middle class” and “perfect marriage”, are created and defined by collective unconsciousness. The film is weaved together by the same actors performing different roles in two different scenes. First, the two actors are requested to improvise a couple’s therapy session of a “perfect” middle-class couple. Then, the two actors are asked to reenact the roles Frank and Cora in the classic American noir film The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). The intersection of these authentic and fictional narratives questions the performative identity in the heteronormative reality of society and mass culture.