Coinciding with this month’s Movie Club screening of Lily Jue Sheng’s films, we present a text on the excavations and invocations of urban space, language and cultural inheritance found in their work. THREE FILMS BY LILY JUE SHENG is available to stream via our Patreon through July 29, 2024.
by Ruairí McCann
The sociologist Stuart Hall once described that dauntingly loaded concept, ‘culture’, in terms both open and precise. Culture is a construction and a living entity that is remarkably vast and malleable. Our identities and outlooks as individuals are inscribed in innumerable and irrevocably different ways, consciously and unconsciously, by the ancestral weight of many generations of collective decisions, attitudes, assumptions and creation. At the same time, this inheritance is not some immovable edifice to which we are shackled, demanding our complete obedience. It’s a communally authored and inhabited organism, to which we can add, reshape or even reject. In other words, there is nothing new under the sun and yet with the combination of ready-made tools and foundations with freshly born points of view, there is the capacity for the new at every waking moment.
Lily Jue Sheng is a filmmaker concerned with looking at, listening to and creating new speculative objects out of their own inheritance as it exists outside of their life and through their thinking and craft as a film artist. Born in Shanghai, raised in New Jersey, and based in New York, their work explores the different relationships, linguistic, spiritual and artistic stemming from having spent their childhood, and now spending their adulthood and artistic life, between two ends of the globe.
Much of their work is a palimpsest, bringing together several strikingly different formal, visual, verbal and animated elements. Though it keeps to one format, 16mm, and is driven by seemingly off the cuff, in the moment observation, rather than careful synthesis, Heritage Architecture (2024) is also a work of collage. For what appears to be a brief record of just one city is in fact composed of many locations. Namely, Shanghai, Taipei, Keelung and Taoyuan, a string of port cities and therefore hyperactive vectors of cultural exchange and change. It’s a film deeply attuned to how urban space is a dense coagulation of different times and mores. Like how a cross-section of a rock face can reveal the lasting signatures of long past geological eras, the city, when perceived with an attentive eye, exposes its decades worth of constituent materials and perspectives. However, they are not neatly stacked in chronological order, but all mixed together in unpredictable, often jarring combinations.
Architecture is one particularly potent site of urban geology, with Sheng’s camera acting like both a parabola and a pickaxe, receiving and opening up these configurations of frozen time. One sequence of shots starts with Sheng tracing the copper, rubber and plastic capillaries of a cyborg; the piping and power lines that straddle a building that is likely older than much of its circulatory system. They then size up and down one of the hallmarks of the modern Chinese construction boom, the apartment block, before cutting to a smaller, older building which has managed to withstand wave after wave of construction and reconstruction. The building is weathered, has been tinkered with, and yet its facade still bears an intricate, hand-carved engraving. A potentially ancient bit of iconography now beyond the time of both of its original engraving, and certainly the symbol’s conception, and yet it’s still capable of radiating meaning.
Sheng’s film work in great part stems from a deep, personal interest in language; in its written and oral forms, its multiplicity of meaning and the relationship between those meanings to its aesthetic qualities. Change 变 (2017) is a rigorous incantation, a work about the spiritual qualities of form. Presented in split screen, two distinct Chinese characters are shown simultaneously against a rapidly shifting series of flashing backgrounds. Each word or phrase is intoned though a voiceover by Sheng, before they cut to the next pair on the beat of a booming bass note. The film starts with matching the counting of numbers with a listing of zodiac signs, a reminder that those other living beings with whom we share this planet have had an immensely long, variable but still universal, history as living symbols. Flesh and blood descriptors, maps and metaphors that we use imaginatively to better understand our own selves, our communities and, beyond each and all of us, the world and its workings.
The pairing becomes increasingly complex and expansive in scale, ranging from the individual parts of the body to features of landscape, the elements and the season cycle. The inspiration and loose organising principle are the I Ching, an ancient Chinese text and mode of divining nature for moral and philosophical guidance, too complex and manifold in nature to explain quickly, adequately, within the short span of this piece. In short, this film that is called Change could also be called Chance or Choice, as a rigorous but also mysterious and open expression of how people look at the world, and then glean, invent and read between its lines.
This interest in space and language intersect in perhaps their most ambitious work, Five Movements (2018-2024), and within it, the physical and metaphorical space of a home. Its setting is an apartment, which acts as a moldable stage and waystation of ideas and memories. Introduced in a tracking shot, it unfurls like a scroll, lined and speckled with multi-coloured lighting patterns and the chimeral paintings of Anjuli Rathod, a cavalcade of continuous metamorphosis. Later on, Sheng cuts to a fairly circumspect and cramped looking hallway, lined with doors that open out in every possible direction—into the past, to different places, aesthetics and amalgamations of individual thoughts, family history, cultural artefacts and their meeting points. There’s a room that houses the gathered detritus of a domestic space, a forest and a temple, while in another a void of revolving, interacting lunar phases. One room contains a photograph of the entrance of an apartment building, older looking than the one we are in, with its weathered concrete skin is embossed with a more recent addition of bulbous cartoon ducks heaving paraphernalia. The presence of medical equipment is a personal marker, with Sheng’s outlets as an artist inextricable from their duties as a caretaker for their elderly parents.
One of the film’s most striking moments is a complete rend away from the digitised space of the apartment. Suddenly, there is a switch to 16mm and a stunning flurry of close-up images of a Buddhist temple and the river, flora and fauna that surrounds it. Using multiple exposures, Sheng breaks up and reconstitutes the frame, delivering a slowly paced, but prismatically arranged flow of close-ups of flowers, running water, toads, turtles and the stone faces of the temple’s statues. These constructed, deified, but also human-like faces, burst out of a placenta of reeds, water and celluloid, staring out in a state of serenity, or perhaps a beckoning opacity.
The scene is steered by a mesmeric piece of music, composed by Nyle Genevieve Kim Kaliski. It’s a plucked, trebly and circuitous melody, echoing the juddering but forward moving pace of the opening tracking shot and another early scene of sonorous footsteps, underpinned by the occasional pranging of a resonant bass note. The style of the music is folk and liturgical, but its lo-fi, distorted texture put it more in the field of experimental music—a scene in which Sheng has an interest and played a part—like the deceptively simple and ramshackle compositions of bands like Climax Golden Twin and The Shadow Ring. Like a great many modernist writers of the early 20th century, who found frameworks and inspiration for their future-minded art in folk tales and myth, there is a shared tendency to strip down or wind back as an act of forward motion, creating new art out of old forms.
The effect of this scene and Sheng’s cinema on the whole is that of being guided along an often rocky and unpredictable flow of different personal, collective and metaphorical forms and experiences towards a state of thoughtful transmogrification. Sheng doesn’t treat these spiritual and animist spheres and objects of influence, which have contributed to their person and their work, as separate elements. Instead they criss-cross, clash and pool together.
Ruairí McCann is an Irish writer, programmer, illustrator and musician, born and living in Belfast but raised in County Sligo. He’s co-editor of Ultra Dogme, a contributing editor to photogénie, and has contributed to aemi, MUBI Notebook, Documentary Magazine, Film Hub NI, Sight & Sound and Screen Slate, among others.
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