‘China Concerto – Bo Wang / Dimanche à Pékin - Chris Marker’

In the presence of Bo Wang (director).

China Concerto is an observational essay about images, representations and performances in China's contemporary spectacles, shot mostly in Chongqing during the peak of Bo Xilai's red campaign in 2010 and 2011, which later ended as China's biggest political scandal after 1989. Concealed beneath the veneer of capitalism, aspects of communist totalitarianism persist today, both in Chinese economy and ideology. The film takes the Markerian form of fictional letters read by a female voice over, in which a man describes what he saw during a trip to China. 

Bo Wang (1982) is a Chinese born artist residing in the US. Next to China Concerto (2012), he directed The Wangs (2016), Traces of an Invisible City: Three Notes on Hong Kong (2016) and Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017). His work has been shown most notably at the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum (New York), at the CPH:DOX Festival (Copenhagen, Denmark) as well as at the Shanghai Biennale.

In the context of this screening, Bo Wang decided to combine China Concerto together with Chris Marker's Sunday in Peking (1956). "Marker's 1950s fascination with China echoes with my starting point for China Concerto, which started with a close analysis on Michelangelo Antonioni's China (1972), one of the few western films made on China during its close-door decades, along with Marker's Sunday in Peking." (Bo Wang)