The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

WANG BING China b.1967 Tiexi Qu ( West of the Tracks ) (stills) 2003 DVCAM transferred to Betacam SP, colour, stereo, 551 minutes [‘Rust’: 176 minutes; ‘Remnants’: 135 minutes; ‘Rails’: 240 minutes], China, Mandarin (English subtitles) / Images courtesy: The artist and Ad Vitam Distribution A digital camera glides through a snow-covered industrial landscape in a series of long tracking shots taken from the front of a train, before plunging handheld through a cloud of vapour at a copper smelter and into a locker room where the workers’ laconic exchanges are recorded. Navigating between dilapidated steel structures and the prosaic gestures and words of those inhabiting them, Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks 2003 — nine hours of finely constructed observational cinema — presents a vast archive of the everyday against a background of industrial decline in the Chinese city of Shenyang. The film’s resonance derives from its contemplative visual style, while its in-depth documentation of life, work and the physical environment is interwoven with elements of narrative and ‘character’. It imparts knowledge about the lives of individuals in a particular location, but also develops an epic quality through its aesthetic choices and slow unfolding. West of the Tracks brings together, in monumental form, a number of defining characteristics of the period in filmmaking since the inception of ‘The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ in 1993: a slow, observational style combined with strong visual qualities; the blurring of documentary and fictional modes; and an exploration of the new possibilities and freedoms offered by digital technology. APT7 profiles this key 20-year period of expanding film production and distribution throughout Asia in a program entitled Change: Paths Through 20 Years of Film. 1 Mountains and Waters: Chinese Animation Since the 1930s forms the other major cinema program for APT7. While animation is not usually associated with the recording of reality, a number of contemporary artists working with animation who are included in the program could be seen, like Wang Bing, as creating constellations of images that constitute an archive of everyday life. In this case though, perhaps the associative arrangements of images are more atlas than archive. In ‘Museums and Novels’, one of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 2009, Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk describes how novels ‘form a rich and powerful archive — of common human feelings, our perceptions of ordinary things, our gestures, utterances, and attitudes’. 2 He continues: ‘Various sounds, words, colloquialisms, smells, images, tastes, objects, and colours are remembered only because novelists observe them and carefully make note of them in their writings’. 3 This quality is contrasted with the art object in the museum: When we stand before an object or a painting in a museum, we can only guess, with the help of the catalogue, how the piece fitted into people’s lives, stories, and worldviews — while in a novel, the images, objects, conversations, smells, stories, beliefs, and sensations are described and preserved as an integral part of the daily life of the period. 4 While Pamuk’s description of objects in the museum recalls historical rather than contemporary collections, it nevertheless points more broadly to the decontextualisation experienced in the museum space, as opposed to how objects come to life when they are entangled in narrative — when they are observed in relation to other things, used and described. His notion of the novel as archive presents interesting parallels with certain forms of narrative and observational cinema. Pamuk is referring to the modern novel developed in the mid nineteenth century in Europe by writers such as Balzac, Stendhal and Dickens, some 50 years before the birth of cinema; the two art forms similarly hold up a mirror to modernity and to modern individual psychology. They unfold over time, and with the necessary participation of viewers/readers who gradually put together in their minds the overall composition of the work. In line with Pamuk’s idea of the novel, film can be a repository for words, actions, environments and emotions, a process of gathering and preserving that has an archival function, participating in ‘historical and psychic processes of inscription and loss’. 5 It is not a given though that the archives contained in film and literature will be universally accessible; engagement, as Pamuk notes, ‘entails a determination to understand those who are different from us’ and access may also be impeded by limitations in translation and distribution. 6 Nevertheless, the last 20 years have seen a ‘shift in cinematographic geopolitics’ 7 marked by the increasing international distribution of films produced in Asia, and particularly by interest in directors such as Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Jia Zhangke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wong Kar-wai, Tsai Ming-liang and Abbas Kiarostami. All of these directors use long takes THE ARCHIVE AND THE ATLAS: CINEMA AS REPOSITORY OF THE EVERYDAY KATHRYN WEIR 54