Title: Aesthetics of Translocality and Crossmediality in Isaac Julian’s Ten Thousand Waves
Lecturer: ZHANG Yingjin (Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Department of Literature, University of California San Diego Campus)
Chairperson: TAN Fan (Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, and Fellow and Director of Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, East China Normal University)
Date: 10 am, June 16th, 2015 (Tuesday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
This article examines translocality and crossmediality as new developments in cinema and visual studies. Isaac Julian’s 9-screen video installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010) represents a migratory aesthetics based on translocal evocation, crossmedial interaction, and mobile spectatorship. As Julien reconstructs the legend of Mazu and memories of Shanghai in radically different modes (e.g., the idyllic versus the phantasmagoric, the nostalgic versus the post-nostalgic), their screen images and sounds enter a constant circulation and produce intriguing multi-directional, multi-spatial, and multi-temporalresonances across different media and genres -- cinema, art photography, video installation, police rescue footage, calligraphy, poetry, painting, and star performance.