Monday January 4 – Thursday January 7, 10:30pm PT
Wenhua Shi
Senses of Time
– Online screening –
Q&A via live chat with the artist at 8:45pm ET
Microscope is very pleased to present an online screening of works by Boston-based artist Wenhua Shi. The screening will begin on Monday January 4th at 7:30pm ET and will remain available until Thursday 7th at 10:30pm PT.
The program features ten works in film and video made by Shi between 2006 and today, including the screening premiere of his new video “Because the Sky is Blue” dedicated to his hometown Wuhan, China. Shi moved to the United States in 2000 and attended the University of Colorado Boulder, studying under Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon.
Shi’s attentive and deeply contemplative look on reality — often drawing connections to shadow play and early cinema — gives shape to intensely lyrical and tacitly subversive works. Two driving interests of Shi’s filmmaking are light and time, and more specifically the wonders produced by sunlight within dark environments as quietly observed by the artist, and the experience of the passage of time through film.
In the 16mm film “Die Nacht” (2018-19), the camera view is from an unlit room with an increasingly luminous window overlooking the neighboring house. In this time-lapse work, this window functions as a sort of aperture, letting shifting amounts of light through while the sun pans across the sky like a mechanical tool. “Morgen” (2018-2019) is a film-haiku on outdoor chairs that are seen only indirectly through the shadows they cast on a wooden deck and their reflections in rainwater. The piece is considered a prelude to another work on the program, “Senses of Time” (2018), which is an investigation of the perception of time via the fortuitous compositions of light moving across the interiors of a house.
Among other works are two from a series of Vertov-inspired video works that “re-examine the three different forms of Modernity and its Utopia” titled “Palimpsest I” (2014), featuring original footage shot in Berlin, and “Palimpsest II” (2014), a documentation of then-President Richard Nixon’s trip to China re-edited from personal Super 8mm film material recorded by Nixon’s aides in Beijing.
Shi’s latest work “Because the Sky is Blue” is a tribute to Muybridge connecting the photographer’s galloping horse to the briefness of social media clips. The work deconstructs a dive into the sea by turning footage from his TikTok feed into an animation through photographic cyanotype techniques applied to single frames.
Wenhua Shi will be available for a Q&A with the audience via live chat at 8:45pm ET on January 4th.
TO WATCH:
Passes for viewing give full access to the video program and live chat.
General admission $8 (Valid through Thursday January 7, 10:30pm PT)Member admission $6 (Valid through Thursday January 7, 10:30pm PT)
_
Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. Shi received a BFA & BA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado and an MFA in New Media/Art Practice at the University of California, Berkley.
Program includes:
Senses of Time
By Wenhua Shi, 16mm film, 2018, 6 minutes
Senses of Time depicts the lyrical and poetic passage of time. The work reflects on time and focuses on defining subjective and perceptual time with close attention to stillness, decay, disappearance, and ruins.
Morgen
By Wenhua Shi, 16mm film, 2018-19, 3 minutes
Prelude to Sense(s) of time.
Endless
By Wenhua Shi, 16mm film to HD video, 2006, 12 minutes
Endless is a meditation on the inevitable deterioration of certain traditional values that have been established (or destroyed) throughout civilization. Restoration by The Lighpress Grant through Interbay Cinema Society.
Gutai
By Wenhua Shi, 16mm film, 2019, 7 minutes
Wenhua took on a radical use of single frame image capture and examines his strange and familiar hometown in China, which he has been away from for nearly two decades. The film title comes from postwar Japanese avant garde artist group Gu-Tai. The kanji ( Chinese) used to write ‘gu’ means tool, measure, or a way of doing something, while ‘tai’ means body. The film is the result of intense looking and seeing what might not be there.
Die Nacht
By Wenhua Shi, 16mm film to HD video, 2018-19, 3 minutes
Die Nacht was inspired by German Composer Richard Strauss’s same title Lieder (Art Song). By employing time lapse photography method, Wenhua captured the view of a house, which was torn down for development soon after the film. The film is dedicated to deceased Experimental Filmmaker Phil Solomon, who had been a major support to Wenhua’s art making.
Descending a Staircase
By Wenhua Shi, HD video, 2012-14, 6 minutes 38 seconds
This work is a homage to Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase.” Created 100 years after, it is a meditation on the mechanical nature of cinema/ Moving Images, through its dynamic movement and fragmentation. The footage was captured at an apartment building in Beijing, China.
Rose
By Wenhua Shi, 16mm film to HD video, 2019, 4 minutes
The Rose, Shi’s most recent experimental piece, alters the space, where a newly planted rose is overgrown through iron fence (captured in Wuhan, China during summer 2019). The film explores the perception of the relationship between foreground and background. The process of editing pays tribute to the optical toy, a bird in a cage, from the pre-cinema period.
Palimpsest I
By Wenhua Shi, HD video, 2014, 5 minutes
Palimpsest is a series of video work as a tribute to Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera.” The footage is gathered from Berlin, Beijing and New York and re-examines the three different forms of Modernity and its Utopia.
Palimpsest II
By Wenhua Shi, Super 8mm film to HD video, 1972-2014, 12 minutes
Palimpsest II is a re-edited travelogue from Super 8mm footage captured by H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin during Nixon’s China trips. Piano by Jiang Shu. Many Thanks to Penny Lane.
Because the Sky is Blue
By Wenhua Shi, 16mm film and HD video, 2020, 4 minutes
Because the Sky is Blue is a short experimental film for my hometown Wuhan. Muybridge captured the galloping horse one hundred forty years ago in a brief 12 frames. The duration of today’s social media video clips is similar to Muybridge’s brevity. I tried to reimagine what subject Muybridge would capture today. All source footage is from my social media feed. I used the cyanotype printing technique to reprint the individual frames and create the final short videos.
_
Microscope Gallery Event Series 2020 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).