5 - Collective Spaces – Individual Narratives

Summary

Abstract

This chapter testifies to Wang’s concern for how individuals came to be exposed to social inequalities as the welfare system declined over the course of China’s transformation. After Fengming, A Chinese Memoir focusing on a first-person recollection of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Wang has continued looking at individual stories as a way to zoom in on certain processes. These intimate portraits of men and women by means of the camera bring to the fore the relationship between collective spaces and individual narratives. They also help introduce the diversity of Wang’s work as some of them were first presented in art exhibition spaces together with video installations and photographic series.

Keywords: Documentary cinema, Post-socialist China, Witnessing, Subaltern, Marginal spaces, Exhibition practices, Wang Bing

While his extraordinary epic, West of the Tracks, traced the destruction of a city’s industrial zone and the forced relocation of thousands of residents, new pic is scaled in opposite fashion–intimate, minimalist, nearly private, as former journalist and teacher He Fengming describes in vividly painful detail how her life in the revolution turned into a 30-year nightmare.

‒ Robert Kohler (2007)

A first impression offers a sense of community and cooperation; it’s only later when the women get talking amongst themselves that we hear about individual grudges and complaints. And then, more stories, and for all the horror, tears are surprisingly few.

‒ David Hudson (2016), Daily | Berlinale 2016 Diary #5 on Ta’ang

In a country that celebrated the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic under the Communist Party government in 2019, collective spaces, or even just the concept of a ‘collective’ narrative, are inevitably strongly rooted in people’s minds. Although strictly linked to socialist ideology, in China the idea of the collective has undergone the same transformation that society has experienced in the last two decades under the drive of reform policies. Moreover, such a concept does not necessarily correspond to the idea of the ‘public sphere’, which is frequently associated with ‘an arena of political deliberation and participation’ within the functioning of democratic governance, in David Harvey’s words (2013: 17).