ARTISTS

Chinese-born, New York–based multidisciplinary artist Cici Wu uses filmmaking to explore what she calls “new subaltern pasts” through narratives of social and cultural belonging. She produced Belonging and Difference in collaboration with the Berlin-based Chinese artist Yuan Yuan. In the work, which was shot on 16mm film and digital video, the pair meditate on local and national histories across the Sinophone world, weaving together afterimages of Beijing’s past in its present landscape with scenes documenting the material conditions of Chinese-speaking shopkeepers in New York. The camera pays careful attention to marginal scenes: an underground queer party, a deserted building, the reflection of light on water. The ephemerality of these images speaks less to a purely poetic impulse and more to an alternative strategy of narrating history.