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As artefacts of their time, films reflect on the realities that drive the filmmaker's desire to make artistic statements audiovisually. These moving images allow us to study the larger environment and circumstances that produce the characters' struggle and shape their sense of being.
The Piano in a Factory, 2010, Meng Zhang
Era of Hero No. 1 , 2005, Yue Minjun
Filmmakers also present historical contexts from unique viewpoints specific to their experiences, showing the tension between individual and collective memory. How the stories are told, where and when the audience's eyes are directed towards something reflects what the artist sees as worth sharing: structural issues that need further discussion, characters whose stories don't get magnified on screens in real life.
Varied in genre, production scale and cinematic conventions, the selected filmography poses challenging questions about China's social, economic, political and cultural development from the 1980s to the present day: a period that also marked the rise of Chinese contemporary art.
Labelled as the seventh art, cinema is constantly in dialogue with other art forms. This website aims to connect three films made after 2000 with three contemporary art pieces. The connections are made based on a common underlying theme or similarities in the questions they pose to the audience about their reflection on history.
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