Flow
Yau Ching / 1993 / 38min / Mandarin, English / English and Chinese Subtitles
Special Jury Prize, Image Forum, Japan; Permanent Collection, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and PBS Broadcast; Invited to Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Galarie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, among others
This experimental documentary uses the life stories of a Chinese woman artist to explore alternatives to dominant versions of history. Having grown up in China during the Cultural Revolution, she went to the U.S. to study, and upon the failure of the students’ movements in 1989, she settled in New York. Flow’s narratives are constructed from her extremely personal and often satirical points of view. Fragments of memory speak to the master narratives of history, not only those of China but also of America, where identity politics has become the main vehicle for cultural governance. This video enables a site of dialogue to interrogate the relationships between different nationalist discourses, and the (im)possibilities of maintaining a survivalist resistance between them.
References
Taiwan Women Film’s Association Database: Flow
Yau, Ching (2012) “Many and Two of (a) Kin(d): An Imaginary Dialogue with Hong Kong Independent Filmmaker Yau Ching.” Chinese History and Society (Berliner China-Hefte) Issue 40 (Aug): 127-137, Berlin: Freie Universität
Signals: How Video Transformed the World, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Mar 5–Jul 8, 2023. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/120228
Reviews
Berenice Reynaud, “New Chinas: Chinese Independent Video.” In Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, eds., Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Holly Willis, “Review of Flow,” Los Angeles Reader 22.
Berenice Reynaud, “Nouvelles Chines: images de la diaspora chinoise” program brochure, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1993.
Wai Wai, “A Hong Kong Woman in New York talking about China––Interview with Yau Ching.” China News Daily, New York, June 20, 1992.
Distribution
Comments are closed.