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Animation, Collage, and the Afterlife of Images: Found Footage in/as Animation
In this essay I explore the porous boundaries between animation, found footage, and collage, and argue that these seemingly separate genres of the moving image coalesce, under certain circumstances, to form a cohesive discourse on the afterlife of images. In their more self-reflective moments, these genres show how they rely on an assemblage of individual frames, displacing images, so to speak elongating their shadows in time. The post-mortem reassembly of disjointed images may serve as a commentary on the need for medial and historical readjustment and relocation. I look at works as disparate as Recycled (Lei Lei, 2012) The Day of Perpetual Night (Yang Yongliang, 2012), Self-Surveillance (Ai Weiwei, 2012), Same Old, Brand New (Cao Fei, 2015), and Dragonfly Eyes (Xu Bing, 2017). READ MORE...
The Activist and the Queer in Contemporary White Snake Productions
inspired by the Chinese white snake legend, three English-language White Snake projects, ranging from Western opera, digital video, to stage play, energetically engage with issues relevant to minority activism in the United States, enriching our understanding of contemporary White Snake repertoire as vigorously multivalent, constantly regenerating, and profoundly empowering. In the Chinese context, three Chinese-language White Snake productions, ranging from TV drama series, animation film, to TV film with an all-child cast, use images of children and females to challenge a world dominated by adults and males, queering the heteronormative romance in the White Snake story, and presenting a bold celebration of the humanity of the nonhuman. We have a lot to learn from these activist, queer bodies of the snake women hybrids, as they continuously teach us the importance of cultural empathy and the power of radical tolerance. READ MORE...