Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings
2017 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
28:00 minutes
Bo Wang
Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings is a two-channel short film by Bo Wang and his frequent collaborator Pan Lu. It takes the history of the British colonial search for tropical plants as a starting point, revealing how early colonial rule and ideologies shaped Hong Kong through the Western gaze. Through the process of transporting and collecting plants, Joseph Banks, who was the botanist and naturalist of the first British diplomatic mission to China (also known as The Macartney Embassy) and advised King George III on the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London with the most diverse botanical and mycological collection in the world. Subsequently, the British Empire continued searching for industrial crops and developing the field of economic botany to tame plants, rearrange the distribution of natural resources, and expand its colonial rule worldwide. In the Guangdong province, China, early Western colonists regarded the moist weather and tropical climate to cause miasma. To depict this Western stereotype, the film interweaves excerpts from the Hollywood film Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), shot in California, in which the director zealously mimics the humidity of a tropical climate with ceiling fans and moving shadows, further revealing the imagination of the Orient and tropicality. The right and power to look at urban space and living conditions are questioned and reassessed in the film. Utilizing and reconciling archival images, footage, and paintings, the film weaves together diverse narratives to present an unofficial and personal voice for storytelling and expressing epistemological uncertainty. The work investigates and reactivates the dynamics between imperialism, orientalism, social hierarchy and race, authorship, and the right to look in 19th Century Canton. Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings examines the urban history of Hong Kong, decentralizing imperial interpretations of the city and centering non-human entities of disease, plants, and paintings.
Through new media, installation, and video and film, Bo Wang’s practice embodies sociopolitical and cultural subjects in contemporary China and beyond. His early documentary work examines the power structures, economy, ideology and the ways in which the Chinese state retains its authoritarian rule while simultaneously pursuing capitalism. Working with critical and contemporary materials, Wang’s recent essay-films, as they interface with capitalism and globalization, provide rich potential for critical self-reflection. So too, they engage the complexity between individualism and nationalism, the bizarreness of reality and the structured knowledge system, and authenticity and authority. Wang’s work depicts these provocative portraits of China by presenting contradictions in its cultural identity, transformation of physical spaces, power structures, perception of time and history, as well as production and consumption of images. These subjects are related with each other, especially in the aspects of how we understand the experience of modernity. His art practice is based on research, often on archival materials, myth and historical narratives, as well as accounts of personal experiences.
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