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.
