Distorting Words
2019 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
24:38 minutes
Wang Tuo
Distorting Words is the second chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy , a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures. Wang’s tetralogy examines the fractures in the modernization of China’s Northeast region. He surfaces overlooked incidents of violence in Chinese society, and characteristic narratives drawn from the past century of the history of greater Northeast Asia, beginning with the May 4th Movement and continuing on to the Chinese Civil War, the Jeju Uprising, and the contemporary plight of migrant workers. The locality of the film series demonstrates an alternative perspective of the region through local culture, spirituality, and historical facts. In 2018, Wang began researching shamanic culture and rituals in Northeast China; this project explores how his idea of “pan-shamanism” can evoke personal and collective experiences through time and space. Wang’s neologism reorients and transforms the idea of shamanism; it does not subscribe to its ancient religious, healing, or divination meanings. Instead, pan-shamanism is a catalyst for a collective belief or power, and for the possibilities of connecting and perceiving diverse experiences, histories, and time. This project is a critical endeavor in exploring the histories, deconstructing the past, and imagining the near future of China’s Northeast. In Distorting Words Wang teases out the story of Zhang Koukou’s revenge, alongside an examination of the Chinese city Harbin. Exploring historical reincarnation, or, what the artist refers to as “pan-shamanization”, the three-channel film reveals that everyone experiences the power of Shamanism through different dimensions of time and space. Wang invents a new dimension to shamanism that suggests how people might transform and connect shamanic power into various mediums and moments from history to the present. The parallel narrative in this chapter collapses time and space by focusing on two events: in 1919, Peking University student Guo Qingguang dies during the May Fourth Movement protest and in 2019, Zhang Koukou is executed. Through these storylines the fates and encounters of protagonists intersect in a complex and disjointed narrative structure. The night before Zhang Koukou’s revenge, he watches a performance by a local band in a bar; while the audience is captivated by the music in the bar (evocative of a shamanic ritual), the student Guo Qingguang hangs himself; a young man gains shamanic power and heals a girl. Accompanying this is multiple soundtracks: a voice-over in a Southern Chinese dialect, rock music, and shamanic folk songs, which capture the emotional and spiritual conditions of the protagonists.
Through film, performance, painting, and drawing, artist Wang Tuo interweaves disparate realities through archives, modern history, myth, and literature. The artist’s work is a powerful examination of modern Chinese history that untangles collective unconsciousness and historical trauma through glimpses into his protagonists’ troubled psyches. Wang’s speculative films excavate and revive archives as contexts in which to reproduce and evoke modern Chinese history and social reality. Intertwining multiple texts and contemporary narratives, Wang’s work ruminates on the universal connotations and historical complicity rooted in our subconscious and dramatic, absurd, yet powerless realities.
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