Smoke and Fire
2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
31:18 minutes
Wang Tuo
Smoke and Fire is the first 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. Smoke and Fire tells the story of a migrant worker who moves through multiple, semi-fantasy worlds. In the first world, the worker is in a warehouse of movie props, where he reads aloud texts that project him into miraculous tales and deeper into his imagination. In another world, the migrant worker journeys back home, experiencing daily life in a small town in Northeast China. In a third narrative, the protagonist enacts the real-life story of Zhang Koukou, who killed three neighbors in 2018 as revenge for his mother’s death twenty-two years prior. In addition to these narratives, the artist interweaves an evocative story from Ming dynasty writer Feng Menglong’s vernacular fiction Stories Old and New , which is about the friendship between two scholars, in which one becomes a ghost to realize his commitment. Without explicitly stating the parallelism, this historical reference suggests how trauma can result in alienation. As such, the first chapter of Wang’s tetralogy reveals the connection between individual trauma and the powerlessness of existing in an unjust reality. With a focus on the migrant laborer’s social identity and internal struggles, Wang’s film evokes a shamanic power that transcends the realistic violent and dramatic scenes, offering profound insights into desperation and tragedy in Chinese society.
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.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » ARTS EQUATOR
House of Cardboard: A review of Impractical Uses of Cake by Yeoh Jo-Ann | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles January 21, 2021 By Nathaniel Chew (800 words, 4-minute read) Is it enough to be not unhappy ? This is what Yeoh Jo-Ann’s Impractical Uses of Cake sets out to interrogate, framing the question in terms that speak to both existential crises at large as well as the uniquely Singaporean predicament of progress and prosperity...
© » BROOKLYN STREET ART
Mana Public Arts Launches Book with Panel at Museum of Graffiti in Miami | Brooklyn Street Art BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY Mana Public Arts (MPA), a privately-funded real estate program supporting public art, announces the launch of a new book this Saturday at the Museum of Graffiti...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
"One Two Jaga": Keberanian Baharu Sinema Malaysia | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles September 11, 2018 Oleh Daniyal Kadir (1260 patah kata, 5-miinit bacaan) Penyampaian kritikan sosial atau politik dalam filem-filem Malaysia jarang berlaku melalui suasana yang berani dan mendatangkan ghairah...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
(Episode 3) What's in a Scene - Cerita Cinta by akulah BIMBO SAKTI | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints November 30, 2020 In this last episode of What’s in a Scene, Noor Effendy Ibrahim and Dalifah Shahril break down a scene from Cerita Cinta (2018)...
© » IMA
Age of Photon / Taro Karibe Exhibition “INCIDENTS” | Exhibition | IMA ONLINE Age of Photon / Taro Karibe Exhibition "INCIDENTS" 24 January 2020 - 8 February 2020 IMA gallery TAGS Taro Karibe IMA gallery Share Title Age of Photon / Taro Karibe Exhibition “INCIDENTS” Dates Friday 24 January, 2020 – Saturday 8 February, 2020 Site IMA gallery （Tokyo） Time 11:00 – 19:00 Closed Sundays and National Holidays Event Saturday 8 February, 15:00-17:00: closing event TAGS Taro Karibe IMA gallery Share Staff Picks HANON Présage / Connotations Yoshinori Mizutani Hideyuki Ishibashi...
© » KADIST
Vishal Jugdeo, VQUEERAM / EPISODES Screening and presentation, followed by a discussion with artist and scholar, Tina Takemoto The experimental documentary video portrait VQUEERAM (2016–ongoing) is part of a collaborative project initiated by Los Angeles-based artist Vishal Jugdeo with Vikram “Vqueeram” Aditya Sahai, a poet, activist, and teacher based in New Delhi, India...
© » DAZED DIGITAL
The strange mystery behind this lost X-Files song | Dazed â¬…ï¸ Left Arrow *ï¸âƒ£ Asterisk â Star Option Sliders âœ‰ï¸ Mail Exit Film & TV News For three decades, fans of the show have been trying to locate the unknown track – and now they’ve finally discovered the truth 12 December 2023 Text Dazed Digital Humankind is haunted by a number of mysteries, many of which are likely to remain unsolved forever...
© » KADIST
Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca
2016Originally commissioned for the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial, the film Estás vendo coisas (You are seeing things) depicts the subculture of Brega music, a fusion of American Hip Hop, Brazilian techno and Caribbean reggaeton that emerged in North Eastern Brazil over the last decade...
© » BROOKLYN STREET ART
Rolex, by Elfo | Brooklyn Street Art BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY photo © Elfo Just like Chanel taking over an old ugly building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and slapping their logo on it, perhaps thinking it was suddenly transformed, we see street artist Elfo sloppily sloshing the letters ROLEX on this abandoned spot in Italy...
© » SLASH PARIS
Bertrand Dezoteux — Projection de Harmonie — L’ahah Griset — Screening — Slash Paris Login Newsletter Twitter Facebook Bertrand Dezoteux — Projection de Harmonie — L’ahah Griset — Screening — Slash Paris English Français Home Events Artists Venues Magazine Videos Back Previous Next Bertrand Dezoteux — Projection de Harmonie Screening Drawing, film Upcoming Bertrand Dezoteux, Harmonie (épisode 1), 2018 Film d’animation Courtesy Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris Bertrand Dezoteux Projection de Harmonie In 4 days: Friday, February 16, 2024 at 7 PM Bertrand Dezoteux Projection de film : “Harmonie” Le 16.02.24 à 19h L’ahah #Griset 4 cité Griset, 75011 Paris Projection du film de Bertrand Dezoteux, Harmonie, suivie d’un échange avec Bernard Gaube modéré par Camille Debrabant, commissaire de l’exposition « Hunimalité »...
© » KADIST
Claudia Martínez Garay
2019escenario chacana by Claudia Martínez Garay is a sculptural work composed of a frame-like structure that contains a series of ceramic pieces...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
The top ArtsEquator articles of 2021 | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints December 31, 2021 Below is a list of the top 10 ArtsEquator articles in 2021, in random order: The Substation: How many more canaries in the coal mine? by Hoe Su Fern Published on: 20 Feb 2021 “Although the current situation facing The Substation is not new or unique, its impending fate is emblematic of, and raises deep questions about the progressively precarious and capricious conditions of arts practice in Singapore.” Also well-read: The Su bstation: An unstoppable force and an immovable object by Nabilah Said and a timeline of events by Ke Weiliang...
© » KADIST
Julius Koller
Anti-Happening refers to Koller’s 1965 manifesto, ‘Anti-Happening (System of Subjective Objectivity)’...
