Isaac Julien: Essay

Inextricable Entanglements: On Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves
By Gao Shiming


Installation view of TEN THOUSAND WAVES (2010) at ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai, 2010. Nine-screen installation, 35mm film transferred to High Definition, 9.2 surround sound, 49 min 41 sec. Photo Adrian Zhou, courtesy of Isaac Julien and ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai.

When I first met Isaac Julien in June 2007, he was preparing to visit China to conduct preliminary research for the production of his film Ten Thousand Waves. This was at a press conference in London for the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, which took the theme “Farewell to Post-Colonialism.” Ten Thousand Waves (2010) is now completed, and has been exhibited in Shanghai. Reflecting upon the bewilderment he felt on his first trip three years ago, Isaac called the experience his “first intellectual reward in China.”

As is well known, Isaac is a representative figure of post-colonial contemporary art practice. His works address issues such as ethnicity and sexuality as they relate to the post-colonial condition, revealing the power dynamics within ideological discourse and excavating the differences within formations of identity. However, from his brief experience in China, Isaac realized that when the issue of “post-coloniality” is brought to a space outside the Western context and re-conceptualized, it undergoes a degree of transformation. The awareness of this transformation compelled him to set aside his familiar expressive methods and political attitudes in order to attempt a discourse on China from a fresh position with newfound complexity. What Ten Thousand Waves exhibits is Isaac’s personal, circuitous route through China.

As a film director, his first concern was confronting the diverse “ready-made” images associated with China, a chaos of impressions woven together from footage from period Kung-Fu films, Republican-era classics, scenic guides and documentary and historic archival materials. He then fragmented and re-sequenced these ready-made visual images into his own narrative. A representation of representations of Chinese culture, the resulting film is the product of a long-term dialogue between Isaac himself and the collaborators he encountered in China. Mazu in her flowing robes, the lonesome qipao dresses of old Shanghai, the entrancing, surreal rooftop view of the Jin Mao Tower at night – Ten Thousand Waves is seemingly Isaac’s aesthetic journal of China of the past few years, but at the heart of this journal is an inextricable entanglement.


Installation view of TEN THOUSAND WAVES (2010) at ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai, 2010.

For a professional audience the danger of an excessively romanticized view of China is apparent in this work, but this is not actually the core issue. In Isaac’s work, we can see his awareness of and concern for the idea of “spectatorship.” This spectatorship is related to the operating mechanisms involving the act of exhibition and the work itself, and is tied to concerns of behavior, performance, cinema, theater and rehearsal. Entering the installation of Ten Thousand Waves, viewers may feel as if they are caught in a labyrinth. This labyrinthine field created by Isaac’s arrangement of multichannel video projections can be seen as a redefinition of the boundaries of montage. Isaac’s re-definition seemingly takes what the French film critic and theorist André Bazin has said about the “spatialization of time” and the “evacuation of space” at face value, and realizes it in an extremely direct and casual way. However, what needs further questioning is what has been lost in this realization: is this method of realization overly simplistic or only apparently so?

In fact, every audience-member’s body is an implicit camera, and when viewing Ten Thousand Waves, their gazes help them to construct sensations and stories for themselves. Accordingly, different people standing in different positions looking at the work from different lines of sight will derive completely different interpretations from what they have just seen. The question is, when a work uses this currently popular exhibition tactic – entrusting the editing of space to the individual movements and gazes of viewers in the exhibition site, making the viewers editors of their own movies – does it not render the intended openness and multiplicity of meaning excessively cheap?

In this labyrinthine imagistic space, the film that people individually experience is tenuous and truncated; but when the artist installed the space he seems to have intentionally constructed an all-encompassing map, one that affords a limitless number of individual journeys, each of which is an alternative choice provided on the map. Simply put, the viewer’s individual experience in relation to the work inside the artist’s head is as a journey is in relation to a map. However, this map is neither a priori nor in the public domain, and in this nonlinear site, the work that is experienced by the audience is woven together from a limitless number of individual perceptions. The artist’s work can be no more than the work generated by the viewers. Perhaps one can also put it this way: is the artist’s “work” merely an untouchable phantasm? From another perspective, one could see the opening of the work to viewers as an inevitability, although Isaac’s multi-screen method dramatically increases our “perceptual density.” What is more important to note is that this kind of multi-screen, chaotic visual scenario is the typical sensory condition of our daily lives, while it is the fixed viewpoint of the cinema that is highly abnormal and institutionalized. Our visual and sensory experiences have been domesticated by the entire visual apparatus of exhibitions, cinemas and so on, which makes Isaac’s installation method of nonlinear, multi-screen film a form of visual liberation, even if the liberation is only temporary.


Installation view of TEN THOUSAND WAVES (2010) at ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai, 2010.

In Ten Thousand Waves, the renowned Shanghai-based media artist Yang Fudong makes an appearance as an actor. Here it seems that Isaac’s intention is to use Yang’s performance to construct a dialogue with China’s art world. Isaac has said of his excitement the first time he saw Yang’s Dawn Mist, Separation Faith (2009): “We not only saw on site the projector and the projectionist, we also saw different kinds of performances and settings, just as if we were looking at a rehearsal. I understand Yang Fudong’s work as being related to the circumstances of filming itself, in that it is both improvised and also directed at the camera, because with every take the results are slightly different – and in the end you choose a sequence from among those takes – so this process is in a sense a rehearsal of form.”

In reality, while Isaac’s Ten Thousand Waves borrows extensively from imagery frequently employed by Yang, the intentionality behind the use of such images is diametrically opposed to Yang’s. In drawing upon diverse Chinese genre films, Isaac hopes that he can also gradually approach China through the appropriation of historical images; whereas for Yang, the emphasis is on establishing a distance. Yang withdraws from the China of the present by entering an ambiguous, chaotic synchronicity of moments that are cut off from each other. In any case, both artists’ works present an undefined, open situation, a reversal from a film’s final presentation to the conditions of studio production, a process of cinema production done in reverse. Regarding this, Isaac has said, “The composition of Ten Thousand Waves places in a prominent position the equipment of movie production, the film studio itself as well as the participants and viewers who come to the shooting location, because obviously the audience expects something to happen on location, and this generates a kind of tension. This work is really about how viewers are being rehearsed in space, and how the work is viewed as an artistic event.”

Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves was exhibited in Shanghai at ShanghArt Gallery, May 21 to June 20 of this year. It is currently on view in the Biennale of Sydney through August 1, and will make its London premiere in the exhibition “Move: Choreographing You,” on view at the Hayward Gallery from October 13, 2010, to January 9, 2011. An exhibition of photographic works related to Ten Thousand Waves will be on view at Victoria Miro Gallery, London, from October 7 to November 6.

All images: Photo Adrian Zhou, courtesy of Isaac Julien and ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai.

Gao Shiming is Deputy Director of the Advanced School of Art and Humanities at China Art Academy, Hangzhou, and Executive Curator of the 8th Shanghai Biennale, “Rehearsal,” opening October 23, 2010, and continuing through February 28, 2011. In 2008 he was co-curator of the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, “Farewell to Post-Colonialism.”

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