Which place can you call home? Where do your roots lie? How do you integrate into Dutch society while at the same time remaining connected to the country you call home? These are the kind of questions that anyone with a history of migration can relate to. Through a series of short videos, made by five young Chinese artists who currently live and work in the Netherlands, we focus on stating and demonstrating the existing power relations, representing cultural transmutation, and positioning the roots of our belongings. The film screenings, followed by a Q&A, propose a dialogue between wandering and settlement, fantasy and reality, and the past and the present.
Crossed the Blue is a short film programme curated Which features works from ZHOU Jinxiao ((Un)learn The intersectional shame), PENG Zuqiang (Sight Leak), CHEN Hangfeng (The intertwined dream), HE Jing & GUO Qiaochu (Real – Integration). Curated by YU Minhong
The Art of Loving Our Selves – (Un)Learn the Intersectional Shame (2020)
Director: ZHOU Jinxiao
Duration: 20′ , Lecture performance
Through performance, Zhou aims to create a safe space to practice embodied forms of (un)learning and explore self-love: the act of loving one’s self. In his performances, Zhou takes an intersectional approach to uncover and understand underlying affections, such as the shame experienced by a non-heterosexual man, his crisis of identity. The artist explores how oppressive power structures rooted in history—coloniality, capitalism and politics—have constructed an emotional framework one is forced to experience while searching for one’s sexual self, including a perpetual sense of shame. Zhou unfolds a multiplicity of selves that allows queer affections to flow, opening up a pathway to communicate with ourselves and gain a deeper understanding of who we are. At the same time, the practice of self-love uncovers and challenges the visible and invisible suppressions non-heterosexual men experience on a daily basis.
Director’s BIO
ZHOU Jinxiao is a visual artist and researcher based in the Netherlands and China. He has a bachelor degree in Movie and Animation from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Utrecht. Love, identity, connection, and Asian queerness are the most important topics of his artistic research and practice. His research is based on contemporary politics, philosophy and visual art.
Sight Leak (2022)
Director: PENG Zuqiang
Duration: 12:15′, single channel video, bw 16mm and Super 8mm film transferred to HD video
“The moon, the sometimes dark street, trees, it’s warm […] at last, a certain eroticism possible (that of the warm night).” When Roland Barthes visited China in 1973, he jotted down some notes that would become part of his Travels in China (Carnets du voyage en Chine), an underplot of desire in his imagination of the country. Barthes did not publish these writings during his lifetime, and his unsettling judgments about China are refracted in Peng Zuqiang’s work as fragments of dialogues on class and looking, responding to the reflections on the same matters elicited alongside Barthes’ sense of eroticism. The local tourist in the film travels through different spaces and gatherings, seemingly never looking at anyone, yet silently looking at someone, turning towards a certain collectivity in the know. A possible subversion of a homoerotic foreign gaze.
Director’s BIO
PENG Zuqiang (1992) makes film, video and installations, with an attention to the affective meaning within histories, bodies, and language. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Cell Project Space, e-flux Screening Room, Times Museum, UCCA Beijing, Times Art Center (Berlin), 25FPS, IDFA, Antimatter, and Open City Doc Festival. He has received fellowships and residencies from IAS CEU, MacDowell, Skowhegan, and the Core Program. He received the Illy Present Future prize 2022, and a ‘Special Mention’ from Festival Film Dokumenter, Yogyakarta for his first feature film, Nan (2020). A resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten.
An Intertwined Dream / 交织的梦 (2022)
Director: CHEN Hangfeng
Duration: 12′
An intertwined dream in which my consciousness was hovering between a lizard and myself. I don’t know where the two parts are going? As time goes by, we all travel between past, present and future… This is an ongoing research project around Collage as a way of thinking, in which I try to explore possible narratives in video collages by appropriating archival moving/images and sounds.
Director’s BIO
Born in Shanghai (1974), now live and work in Amsterdam. Since 2021, Chen is a researcher at the Artistic research in andthrough cinema – Master Program of Netherlands Film Academy. His work cross fine art and cinema, which deal with issues of surrounding commercialization, environmentalism, globalization and cultural transmutation, often realized through playful metaphor and he merge concepts and mediums like an alchemist. He sees artist as a present-day incarnation of ancient philosopher, artisan and literati. His works have been shown and collected at: AM space, MoCA (CN), Rockbund Museum (CN), Today Art Museum (CN), Videotage (CN); Palais de Tokyo (FR); SinArts Gallery (NL), LAM and Tropenmuseum (NL).
Real – Integration (2021)
Director: HE Jing & GUO Qiaochu
Duration: 9:03′, single channel video
Real-Integration is a response to the issues of discrimination and race/identities in Real Dutch life for an Asian, by remaking the Dutch civic integration exam(inburgeringsexamen), which consists of 10 scenarios from the true stories of 23 contributors. There is no standard answer. The “inburgeringsexamen” intends for foreigners to understand the knowledge of Dutch society, including how to visit a patient in the hospital. It is a demonstration of the basic official picture of citizens’ life, but has never included the more complex and invisible reality: the explicit or implicit discrimination we may encounter on the street or even at a friend’s house.
Director’s BIO
GUO Qiaochu was Born in China, and recently based in the Netherlands. Its/their work explores the dynamism of the body, the interplay between the body and the system in which it is embedded, and how the body’s imaginary possibilities can be used to intertwine complex social relationships. GUO has shown works and presented at Van Abbe museum, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Framer Framed, Kunstloc, Worm, and others.
HE Jing is a Chinese visual artist based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Jing’s interest in culture, politics and the history behind various daily objects, leads to imaginative visual representations involving various materials and mediums. Her works have been included in the collection of The Art of Institute of Chicago (US), Design Society Museum in Shenzhen ( CN), and Françoise van den Bosch Foundation (NL) collection, which is held by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL).
About
The Inbetweeners Dialogue provides a safe space for people of different personal and professional backgrounds to discuss public issues that matter to us all. We hope to break free from echo chambers and promote intercultural and interdisciplinary understanding through discussions that may not yield immediate benefits but can provoke serious thought for the long run.
Moderator: YUE Tao
Tao Yue is a business storyteller, intercultural trainer, and novelist. She is also a founder of the InBetweeners Dialogue. Her professional publications appeared in the Financial Times and the Harvard Business Review. Her novels were published in Chinese, English, and Dutch.
Moderator: YU Minhong
Minhong Yu (China, 1990) is a curator and visual artist based in the Netherlands. She graduated from the Sandberg Instituut and China Central Academy of Fine Arts. Her work is concerned with visibilities and invisibilities relating to social issues in the digital world. It ranges from publications to video clash which questions the notion of identities and the state of imbalanced power. Living between the two continents, Minhong inhabits two cultures simultaneously, creating a dialogue in between them.
