Presenting: Zhu Xiaowen, Oriental Silk, Documentary film, 2015, 29’32”
Arthub previously collaborated with Zhu Xiaowen in 2015 for the Chinese premiere of Oriental Silk at Aurora Museum in Shanghai. Later that year, Zhu’s work was showcased on Arthub’s online Screening Program. The presentation of the three-channel video Distance Between, questioned notions of experimental documentary as a tool for traversing the boundaries of video art, documentary and all that lies between. In her 2012 work, the artist began to explore issues of estrangement, homeland and migration—themes further investigated in Oriental Silk.
The documentary launches concurrently with Exhibition on the Table, an IRL production of the online program. The two-pronged project is an attempt to defy notions of artistic accessibility, thus ensuring that viewers are exposed to new media art in a variety of formats.
Read Zhu Xiaowen’s 2015 interview with Arthub’s Francesca Girelli here.
Artist Introduction
Zhu Xiaowen is a documentary filmmaker, media artist, curator and writer. Described as a visual poet, social critic, and aesthetic researcher, she uses video, photography, performance, installation and mixed media as platforms to communicate the complex experience of being an international person and to wrestle with the notion of a disembodied identity.
Artwork Introduction
Oriental Silk explores the worldview of the owner of the first silk importing company in Los Angeles. Carefully and quietly, the film observes this owner, Kenneth Wong, as he goes through his daily routine in the store and tells his story: how his parents, first-generation Chinese immigrants, realized the American dream through the store; how the once legendary store’s fortunes rose in close connection with the Hollywood entertainment industry, then fell with the proliferation of cheaper silk in the new global economy; how he himself came to be the owner of the shop and caretaker of the family legacy; and about his deep feelings for the shop, its history, and its future.
Director / Producer: Zhu Xiaowen
Camera: Zhu Xiaowen, Tim Maxeiner
Editing: Zhu Xiaowen
Music: Mario Kaoru Mevy
Color: Yves Roy Vallaster
Design: Matthias Winckelmann
In his text
Strong Threads, Whitechapel Gallery’s Film Curator
Gareth Evans, extrapolates on the artist’s ability to tactfully present Kenneth Wong and his shop as a case study for the international financial meltdown in 2008 and the role of the “merchant” in linking distinct cultures and people. Furthermore, Evans applauds Oriental Silk, for its reimagining of material – too often denoted as a mere commodity – but here, managing to become a representational symbol of people and places, not limited by geographic and/or temporal borders.
Strong Threads
By Gareth Evans
When it comes to acts of witness, to testimonials of experience – lived, felt, shared or private – we tend to think first that these statements of heightened being are exactly that, dispatches snatched from the frontline (or thereabouts) of a crisis, histories oral or otherwise that have made it over the border to safety (the border, of course, might be geographical but could equally well be temporal, social, political, generational or defined around gender, belief, race and other tenets of identity: it can sometimes be as hard to survive a family as a war).
What makes
Oriental Silk both poignant and useful is not only that it provides undeniably rewarding witness and testimony (as well as insightful responses from a soft threshold in the ongoing globalization of things) but that it reports from the counter of a single store and from the daily routine of a single man.
Kenneth Wong’s Beverly Hills Chinese import silk emporium (into its 40s now and inherited from his father) might not come to mind as a productive place to look to for evidence of either the often astonishing histories of twentieth century migration or the effects of international financial meltdown. That it offers both and much more besides is testament both to Xiaowen Zhu’s careful conversational style and to Mr. Wong’s own keenly felt sense – acutely aware of his role in both the long and shorter stories of international trade – that we are living at a moment of profound change in how human beings organize and prioritize both their collective and their intimate lives (in other words, their needs and their desires).
By looking ‘micro’ at a ‘macro’ situation, Xiaowen Zhu’s film can gently suggest where larger palette studies would feel the need to speak more loudly, or more insistently. And in Mr. Wong she has an affecting collaborator. An engineer by study and initial profession, he took the store on when none of his older siblings expressed an interest in doing so, and following his father’s decision to retire. Visibly moved when he speaks of having seen the store’s birth and the innumerable hours of labour expended to make it viable, Mr. Wong speaks to a wholly different register than that driving the imperatives – and decisions, sought or not – of almost all contemporary business.
In his case, the knowledgeable and sincere sale of Chinese silk in all its miraculous hues and textures is a commitment to the idea of the merchant as a joiner of disparate worlds, a conduit of the novel and the ancient-made-new, a shrinker of distances but an expander of the imaginative, a wanderer through the goods – and the good – of the world, so that those he returns to might benefit. It is not for nothing that the greatest trade route in history was called
The Silk Road.
In this way, the ‘useless’ beauty of silk and its wondrous (labour- and time-intensive) hand-stitched adornments stand for all those human pursuits that link people and place – and provide purpose – across time and borders. Skilled craft, appreciated for centuries, bestows dignity and respect on the artisan, is enjoyed by and enhances the purchaser, their life and surroundings, and provides meaning for both the families and communities within which the maker and merchant reside. A thread runs – literally – from the silkworm farms of China to the television and film studios of Hollywood in this case. And attention is paid, along with the financial, at every step in the transactional process. This dedication to skill and its outcome raises the quality of the exchange and, in a very real way, the actual fibre of the human story of which it is a part.
The 2008 financial collapse – and the subsequent doubling in the price of silk – means that Mr. Wong’s store faces a very uncertain future. His own age, the steady erosion of a skilled labour base back in China, the growing contentment globally with industrially made products and the changing nature of Mr. Wong’s customers, especially in Hollywood, all suggest that Oriental Silk might struggle to reach its half-century anniversary. Another storefront vacant on Main Street – so it goes…
Well, yes, so it can go, but it doesn’t need to be this way. Mr. Wong, kind, generous, unfailingly modest, knows nostalgia when he sees it (and is surely entitled to feel it from time to time). But he also knows about priorities, and how meaning, an awareness of personal, shared and cultural history, can and should survive, to inform the present and enable a valid future. As always, it is not about establishing a turf war with Poundland but about allowing for a waterfront of possibility, a democracy to Capital and its offers that allows the craft to co-exist with the purely commercial. Market Capitalism it seemed, understood that. Finance Capitalism couldn’t care less – and arguably isn’t even aware of the concern.
Gareth Evans is a writer, editor, presenter and event / film producer.
Arthub would like to thank Bloomsbury Gallery London, Dot Collection, Kenneth Wong, Gareth Evans, Huilin Jia, Jevgenija Kuznecova, Yinsey Wang, Kite Chuang, Weic Lin, Yana Marlow, and of course Zhu Xiaowen for their efforts, without which this project would not have been possible.
Check out Arthub’s full 2016 Screening Program
here.
Artist Introduction (extended)
Born and raised in Shanghai, Zhu Xiaowen is currently based in London, UK. She is the first receipt of the TASML Artist Residency Award and Marylyn Ginsburg Klaus Post-MFA Fellowship. She was an artist-in-residence at ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany and V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She is a mentor of the British Film Institute Film Academy, a member of the Los Angeles Art Association, and formerly a Visiting Professor of Media Art at Syracuse University and Marymount College in USA. Zhu received her MFA in Art Video from Syracuse University, USA and BA in Film, TV Production & Media Art from Tongji University, China.
Zhu’s work has been shown at Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK), Whitstable Biennale (Whitstable, UK), Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum (Beijing China), Chronus Art Center (Shanghai, China), Art Basel Hongkong, ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), V2_Institute for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), ISEA2011 (Istanbul, Turkey), Dumbo Arts Center (New York, USA), Videonale (Berlin, Germany), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, USA), Los Angeles Art Association (Los Angeles, USA), Venice Arts Gallery (Los Angeles, USA), Strozzina Art Space (Florence,Italy), Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts (Norwich, UK), Toronto Urban Film Festival (Toronto, Canada), DOK Munich (Munich, Germany), Film Winter (Stuttgart, Germany), Athens Video Art Festival (Athens, Greece), K3 Film Festival (Austria), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, USA), Shanghai eArts Festival(Shanghai, China) and more.
