Tungus
2021 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
1:09:27 minutes
Wang Tuo
Tungus is the third 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. Tungus investigates the history of Northeast China, and more specifically the artist’s hometown of Changchun, the former capital of Manchuria. This chapter is set against the backdrop of the Siege of Changchun during the Kuomintang-Communist Civil War of 1948; an event that is largely unacknowledged in Chinese history textbooks. At the time, Changchun was under Kuomintang rule and the Communist Party of China wanted to take control as part of its liberation strategy. The siege lasted for over six months, and no one was able to enter or leave the city, meaning that food and medical supplies were also halted, resulting in mass starvation and death. The narrative follows the journey of two Korean soldiers, from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, attempting to flee Changchun. The film intertwines the parallel history of the Jeju Uprising after the Korean War, which also took place in 1948, though archives documenting the event were only released in 2000. An additional narrative follows a scholar who refuses to flee Changchun, and then, in a starvation-induced hallucination, imagines himself at the May 4th Movement of 1919. Through these overlapping narratives, the film suggests that delusions from a shared traumatic experience can result in a mass conversion to pan-shamanism.
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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