Theodor Adorno’s idea that art should be autonomous is derived from a radical tradition that saw in aesthetics the potential for resistance against the reifying impulses of the market economy. The word autonomy to him meant not just something uncompromised by outside influence (and specifically the mode of production) but also that contained within itself its own aesthetic attitudes towards representation that had to be experienced to be understood. If the totality of an object could grasped from its description, it would not be autonomous, because it fit smoothly into a pre-existing rubric for beauty and meaning.

I feel that this concept is useful for gauging good art even outside of a radical tradition, and that the second part of the above definition can override the first, but not vice versa. At the very least, good new art should be ambitious in its approach to representation. As an example, Yang Fudong’s Fragrant River, a multi-screen black-and-white video exhibition exploring the subconscious of the artist’s Chinese hometown, reviewed here a few months ago, is clearly an autonomous art installation. It is not explicitly anti-capitalist or anti-establishment, and does not by any means try to escape the social relations or means of production in which it was formulated. It is nonetheless wholly original in its aesthetic vision, containing a novel, challenging approach towards the representation of familiar themes such as rurality, intimacy, and memory that draws the viewer towards something almost alien.

The mainstream film industry has seemingly turned my two-part equation on its head, hoping that an inauthentic attempt to fulfill the first part of the definition of autonomous art (uncompromised by structural conditions) could be achieved by simply cranking out narratives of resistance which role-play a critical perspective against a vulgar caricature of capitalist dystopia – under the impression that this might override the fact that they are not doing anything new at all. Just in the past 20 years there are infinite examples at varying levels of maturity, from The Hunger Games to Parasite, The Triangle of Sadness to Wall-E. The astute consumer of media will note immediately that these are not autonomous art objects, as they draw upon cliché, hyperbole, escapism, and sarcasm. They present only a refraction, often comic or melodramatic in nature, of existing attitudes towards acceptable modes of representation. Fredric Jameson wrote in response to Adorno that the transition towards post-modernity brought with it the “end of aesthetics,” the proliferation of spectacle, and the loss of the ability of art to function as a critique of politics. The post-modern devices were irony, mockery, allegory, pastiche, which meant methods of resistance were reduced to re-representing objects of critique in silly or dramatic ways.

These derivative, ironic resistance narratives are more and more common in film. And at the risk of being a bad critic who engages with bad art objects, I’ve found myself compelled to write about them in order to think a little bit about what the proliferation of these kinds of stories means, and how they integrate (or not) with other criteria of artistic judgement. We’ll go in reverse chronological order.

Which brings us back to Kenji Tanigaki’s 2026 The Furious (TF), a Hong Kong martial arts production that follows a Chinese mute day-laborer living in an unnamed country that obviously is supposed to be Thailand. When his daughter is kidnapped, he cuts a bloody swath through a local pedophile ring with the help of a journalist with miraculous Judo abilities. The movie reunites a few of The Raid cast, and was supposed to be a kind of revitalization of the bloody bruiser martial arts film. The Raid, less shy about its geopolitical implications and set explicitly in Indonesia, was a wholly novel synthesis of Indonesian martial arts, Hong Kong gun-fu, and Hollywood neo-noir. It was injected with a kind of hyper-violence that was unfamiliar to audiences but that immediately bespoke a deep and original love for the ability of action choreography, when taken to its highest level, to convey emotion through a new kind of sensory representation (autonomous, for those following along). Affectively, it was totally unironic, pairing the Ur-motivations of revenge, honor, and the physical struggle for dignity with a new kind of spectacle-as-storytelling.

The Furious is an exceptional achievement. The action is beautiful and engrossing, and for the first half of the film I was ready to write a glowing review. There is one incredible scene where a motorcycle rolls through a tight, Old-Boy-esque corridor, while the laborer’s daughter sits in reverse and smashes the heads of goons in with a hammer. We watch the whole thing from a camera attached to one of the rear-view mirrors of the motorcycle, feeling every jolt and blood spatter. It is highly technical, in both choreography and cinematography. The camera moves in dramatic high-speed crane pans through 360 degrees of space, like an additional combatant leaping through the air above the other fighters. There is an attention to craft and a desire to do something new, pushing the rubric set by The Raid and the John Wick series forward.

But as it introduced its villains and tried to expand the stakes beyond a story of father and daughter, it stumbled into what has become a strange and familiar trap for these filmmakers; behind the kidnapper thugs is an international pedophile ring that make money through livestreams. A lot of time is spent showing us the scrolling chat of their livestream channel, complete with a white man doing a voiceover of the most threatening messages: “I love boys under 13! Show another one!” – “Let’s see an Asian girl!” The movie even ends with real police raid footage (extremely ridiculous; a blurry, shaky bodycam shows tens of armed police escorting short, bald, pale men into vans, before panning to boxes of CDs and VHS tapes) accompanied by text that explained to us that in the past few years an international coalition of police from China, Southeast Asia, and the U.S. have arrested X number of child porn distributors, and that the fight against exploitation continues.

It is a weird decision to make. Maybe the filmmakers thought the Epstein headlines would make a film like this more cathartic, and the constant references to live-streaming would attract a younger audience and lend credibility to their desire to depict a world that has changed since the time of The Raid and John Wick. But it is ensnared by both a literal-mindedness that completely detracts from their love for the craft of fight choreography, and a strange attempt at bricolage of the real, pulling standalone images from our reality into their efforts at aesthetic representation.

There are so many fantastical elements to the fights, which are lovely; a bald tattooed heavy-weight who fights by launching himself like a frog headfirst into his opponents is shot, hit with a sledgehammer, stabbed through the chest, repeatedly battered into the ground and into metal bars, only to continue to get back up in increasingly acrobatic ways to rejoin the fight. This exaggerated indestructibility seems to be a core ethos of this film, and really did seem to have a serious impact on the audience. People were cackling and oo-ing and shouting “Ouch!” in my Beijing theater. Audiences in China want to imagine that the power of pure emotion conveys a kind of invincibility against the most dangerous of threats, forgetting for a while the myriad mundane, painless ways they are beaten down by a shrinking economy. We are energized by a man overcoming not just difficult odds but brutal, inhuman levels of pain. It is a kind of vicarious bodily triumph in a disembodied world, and it is very satisfying.

So why does the story need to so closely try to mirror reality? There is nothing ironic about this film. It simply wants to add a kind of martial arts superhero to our world of digital exploitation, where plutocrats can assault and traffic without punishment. And the streaming element really throws everything off. Towards the end of the movie, the head honcho is introduced, face covered in shadows, who commands his rich fail-son over the phone to administer more strictly the Thailand arm of his digital media syndicate. The many cuts to phone screens and livestreams seems to distribute sin throughout a kind of imaginary international pervert class. The evil-ness of the gangsters in front of our protagonist seem simultaneously enhanced and deferred by the presence of these rich stakeholders.

In our world, pedophiles are not faceless. They are broadcast for everyone to see. We know their names intimately. There is nothing mysterious about them, and there is nothing glorious about rounding up a few of their foot soldiers in Thailand. In some twisted way, their real evil is not corporal but in the ways that they’ve managed to contort our systems of representation. The more we talk about pedophiles, the less we do about them. The more they are depicted as repulsive and fat and faceless and vulgar, the simpler and more manageable they seem.

And this idea of representation brings me to the next film I want to talk about: Edgar Wright’s 2025 The Running Man (TRM). Wright is highly regarded. Shaun of the Dead is a classic, instinctive and funny and Zizekian. TRM carries over the classic Wright formula of a genre film in which the action protagonist affectively subverts expectations, often leading to a kind of human triumph over structural conditions and a meta-commentary on the nature of genre fiction. Glen Powell, also playing a recently fired day-laborer, has been tasked by Wright not with Simon Pegg’s inane, witty heroism but with a totally unhumorous rage, aimed at a caricature of an inhumane bureaucracy and an unequal economy of spectacle and extraction. In order to make money to save his sick daughter, Powell’s character joins a TV show, The Running Man, where he wins cash prizes for each day he survives being hunted by an armed death squad and an angry, trigger-happy civilian population. The TV channel, a heavily defended appendage of an authoritarian state, is run by a sinister media mogul, eager to improve his ratings by drawing out the chase and manufacturing human drama.

This is an adaptation of the 1982 Stephen King novel and the 1987 Paul Michael Glasser film with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and carries with it an obsession with the power of broadcast media from that time period. Here, the media mogul, played by Josh Brolin, is an extremely menacing manipulator of spectacle, producing certain twists within his television show that shock even us, the audience of the film. It appears that there is nothing he cannot massage into suiting his goals of grabbing more eyeballs and contort any attempt to criticize the television channel into fuel for personal, emotive vendettas. The finale is too convoluted to recite here, but through a combination of live censorship, AI-assisted audio edits, and last-minute reveals, Brolin’s character turns Powell’s attempt to escape the show through a nuclear threat into a narrative of vengeance that will appropriate the latter’s earlier attempts to incite revolution into a moment of catharsis that will please audiences, valorize Powell as an heroic agent of the state, and set up a second season.

It is a kind of literalization of the Marxian idea that capitalism absorbs any contradiction into itself, and it is successful in demonstrating its horror. The ending, however, is all roses and reunifications and revolution, and contains a hilarious scene of a talk-show audience, previously fueled by Schadenfreude but now class conscious, climbing over the seats in front of them to burn and stab the television producer and his assistants. (By comparison, King’s novel ends with the hero crashing a plane into the TV headquarters, and Glasser’s film ends with resistance fighters taking over the TV building).

This movie is much more successful in a depiction of the tentacular evil of media, the way it reaches into the mind of your mother and your next door neighbor’s kids and turns the impoverished against each other while an elite media class use get-rich-quick dreams to beat down social unrest. But the success of Wright’s depiction of the incredible ability of media producers to change our reality and allow only the narratives which suit them, coupled with his triumphant climax, leaves one cold. We are left with the conspiratorial understanding that this movie, and its impossible story about a man who is able to beat the elite class and get the girl purely through rage and physical prowess, is only broadcast to us because it peddles an impossible, paralyzing dream.

This obsession with representation and meta-discussions of entertainment abound in popular culture. Consider Squid Game, another media product where evil literally wears a mask and literally pits the desperate against each other for their own entertainment. If this was supposed to be an allegory for the abstracted way this happens in our world, it is a very simple one. The Epstein class understands that if we become obsessed with their sins as sins of the body and not of the mind, we might hold on to hope that victory could be as simple as a well-timed police raid, an angry and muscular man in the right place at the right time, or a well-choreographed martial arts move. To make an autonomous action film would mean taking seriously the idea that power moves through our world not through the livestream of a pedophile but through access to imagination.

In this regard, Edgar Wright may have come the closest to achieving something new and honest, maybe even more so than someone like Paul Thomas Anderson, and it is simply a feature of his story that it forces us back into ourselves, to think about how the power depicted in his fictional world functions in our real one.

She interpreted the experience through a Chinese idiom, that of eating bitterness (enduring hardship). In China, the end of the 20^th century promised material gain and the fiery incarnation of a world of plenty, drawn from the ashes of the violence of the preceding 80 years; the prerequisite for was that the populace would need to eat some bitter things first. This meant 16-hour days studying, grueling train journeys to business meetings in faraway cities, blood-curdling meetings with Party bosses as one rose slowly and painfully up the ladder. Nonetheless, the destination was clear; a handful of small apartments in a second-tier city, the best schools for your kids, vacations to France.

Her two years of bitter consumption have left her with none of it. While working through two promotions and a huge increase in the responsibility at her day job, she published two academic papers with peers in Hong Kong and at Harvard. She wrote almost a hundred pages of literature review for her proposals. We rehearsed interviews, shared our readings over dinner, followed up curiosities that had emerged at work, cultivated connections across three continents, applied to 25 schools, for 24 months. The idiom of eating bitterness is rotten; when things get too bitter, you throw up. There is nothing waiting for you at the end.

My interpretation adheres to the Western canon; it feels tragic in the Greek sense – a blindness as to the nature of our circumstances, the futility of our decisions, which were doomed from the first moment of their tragic inception. No amount of good intentions or hard work could right the ship. We have been smashed up against the rocks of a collapsing pipeline of scholarly apprenticeship. The most brutal feature of the process has been the perspective we’ve been given in Chinese education; her peers from high school who’ve settled in to tenure-track positions in Hong Kong, who’ve obtained prestigious post-doc positions in California, seem so obviously lacking in any real academic ability. The students we routinely send to universities like UCI or NYU cannot speak English.

We all face rejection. This one I am reframing as a test of my commitment to the life of the mind. Tongue-in-cheek - all of you out there who’ve achieved conventional success in the culture industries, in writing, through scholarship, how can you be sure you love the game, seeing as it remunerates you so well? It is only when everybody says there is no money for you that you can know if you still want to do something.

Last weekend we went to see Enrica Falqui at Beijing’s Zhaodai Club. It is a proper techno underground space, complete with the mandatory smiley-face sticker placed over your camera lens upon entry. It was a fantastic set, and Falqui is a real draw. I think people are not really writing about the underground music scene in Beijing anymore, because the dominant narrative is that the punk and experimental scene that flourished here at the beginning of the century has been largely crushed. Interesting music now supposedly comes out of China’s South and Southwest, and arrives in the form of ambient or alternative rock.

And its true that Beijing’s most famous techno clubs have slowed down. We went to Groundless Factory 798 for a warm-up set before going to see Enrica, and it was a pretty thin shadow of its former self, in the carcass of an unused powerplant. Probably 85% of its patrons spoke English – international students or students studying abroad. The DJs were younger than me, and poured vodka into people’s mouths as they took the stage.

But there is still some serious nightlife, and if you live here you can be exposed to some pretty special things. Its easy to get caught up in an internet-era interpretation of Benjamin’s aura concept, combined with the Brooklynite hipster concept of arriving first. The idea goes that only a few things on the internet are really authentic, and its easier to determine something’s authenticity if you arrive early. Recently in China there has been a bit of algorithm fatigue. People are frustrated by the speed of conformity and commerce, which seem to beat everyone everywhere. ZhaoDai maintains an extremely small digital footprint, and can’t be found on any Map app or the registry of restaurants and bars called Dianping (大众点评). One of the busiest streets in Beijing in the spring is Niujie (牛街), Cow Street, home to a large community of the Hui ethnicity and Beijing’s most active muslim temples and Halal markets. People flock here for lamb buns, local yogurt, a specific kind of mochi wrap with fruit paste inside. I’ve asked a few of my friends why its so popular, and get the same answer every time: “People want freshness! And they like local and low-key (低调) experiences.”

Places like Chengdu or Berlin or Nashville supposedly are home to a greater proportion of auratic, authentic culture than others, and its easy to dismiss out of hand Beijing. But there is a vibrancy in the places off the algorithm, in moments of everyday life, everywhere. An obsession with authenticity contains a form of avant-garde elitism. Its applies to intellectual spaces too. We can’t throw out the heuristic of quality, because its obvious that Cambridge Maths will teach you more than most other places. But the idea that there are some select spaces where real things are happening in a way that they are not in others is a 17^th century idea, the delusional romance of the salon that brought together unmatched geniuses for exchange and innovation.

A lot of people in Beijing are working really hard to preserve its connection with a Detroit-Berlin techno lineage, and for the most part they are pretty successful. I’m sure financially it can be tough, but people like me and the hundreds of other regulars at Zhaodai appreciate the authenticity of their efforts, and the experiences they provide. A few months ago we even went to an exhibition called Techno Worlds, sponsored by the Goethe-Institut. Its is traveling exhibition, and tells the story of the geographic movement of the techno aesthetic. Here in Beijing, the exhibition space lies directly across from one of the premier techno clubs, and is supplemented by a video installations of 22 screens, depicting stills and short clips from the history of Chinese electronica.

The set at Zhaodai was one of the best I’ve been to. The crowd was more dispersed, a bit less aggressive, and much shorter in stature than Berlin crowds, but people were tapped into the story being told in a real way, engaged with the altered state of consciousness that techno confers. I read a hilarious Note here a few weeks ago from M. E. Rothwell that made the argument that techno music is the real sound of postmodernism. I forgot the details, but it was something about how the Detroit-Berlin connection was a response to deindustrialization, the instrument-less character of the music a response to the deracinated, shifting geography of production, and the disembodied, watery mode of dancing a response to the need to improvise new rhythms against a lifeworld that had lost all of its patterns.

Beijing fits nicely into this rubric – deindustrialized, deracinated, discombobulated by capital, and nonetheless vibrant in its own right. According to the prevailing narrative, techno music was propelled into Europe by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the youth ferment which followed. Here, where history continues, techno demonstrates yet again its ability to transcend the modern, bringing us face to face with what lies beyond the mask of liberal coherence.

There are a lot of negative prefixes above. Real Beijing techno seems to attract a kind of drifter archetype, young, marginalized, underemployed. They dress in black and sometimes come with wigs and crazy dyed hair. The sound of postmodernism is necessarily the sound of loss, a kind of escapist nihilism beyond the rubric of conventional pop culture form. The trick, when the gravity of this negativity grows strong, is to summon the spirit of Lu Xun, who Wang Hui has recently described as the chief theorist of “defeat as the permanent condition of the honest observer.” How can one internalize despair, loss, a shrinkage of the possible and of the real, while not becoming a fantastical, nihilistic conservative? Lu Xun’s answer was what he proscribed as an attitude of permanent revolution, the idea that the progressive impulse needed to be refreshed in every passing moment, because pulling the new out of the old will always seem like a loss, until it isn’t.

杨福东是个地道的北方摇滚老炮儿。长发。室内不脱墨镜的那种。沉默寡言，自信满满，烟不离手，对世纪之交的寻常生活怀有近乎偏执的高度抽象化的艺术追求。就读油画系的第二年，他立誓沉默整整一个月，靠在手背上写字与外界沟通。这一个月里，他记录下了自己的手。出现频率最高的那句话是：“有厕纸吗？”

自九十年代中期毕业以来，他已稳居中国最重要的录像装置艺术家之列。他的美学气质，一言蔽之：乡土千禧年。其维基百科词条将他的风格定义为中国水墨长卷的怀乡情绪与吉姆·贾木许的混合体。油画训练渗透进他所有的作品——不仅仅因为他几乎只拍黑白，更在于他对风景的迷恋、对抒情性的执着，以及他将中国传统文人画精神中那种对知识分子内心世界的偏执关注重新落地的努力：把这种关注从精英的书斋移植到中国腹地乡村平民生活的当代语境之中，完成一次去精英化的还原。

《香河》是他最新的展览，于去年十一月至今年五月在北京尤伦斯当代艺术中心展出——这是中国首屈一指的当代艺术机构。这是一首献给故乡的颂歌：一个位于河北省的小村庄。河北是环抱北京的北方大省，一片工业化、荒漠化的土地，相较于许多邻省较为贫困，也是北京绝大多数外来务工人员的原乡。展览的墙上文字称这个项目酝酿了三十年，自1997年便在艺术家心中萌芽。2016年，杨福东带领团队赴村拍摄，历时四十七天，此后用了整整八年进行后期制作。成果是七小时的影像，分布于十五个频道、十五块屏幕之上。有些屏幕集中展示，有些则单独放置。

为了向这件录像装置的制作过程致以应有的敬意，展览空间的前三分之二全部用于呈现一系列照片、绘画与录音，既记录了那七小时影像背后所有实际的劳动投入，也呈现了杨福东收集与整理创作主题的更为幽深的思维过程。这是极出色的策展，尤其是对于像我初次那样“裸入”展览的观众而言。穿越三个录像空间，走过艺术家学生时代的数幅绘画，走过一组超现实主义风格的家具——它们出现在影像中最如梦似幻的段落里——最终，拉开最后一道帷幕，《香河》方才真正“登场”，如同初次现身。那一刻令人振奋，仿佛你穿越了艺术家的整个精神世界，终于直面那件凝聚了此前所有痛苦与奇异的物件本身。

录像空间共有八个房间，不设照明，迷宫般排列。每个房间内有一块、两块或三块屏幕，同步播放。它们以高度风格化的方式讲述了四个人物的故事：一对母子，一对青年男女，故事发生在小镇筹备新年庆典之际。全部以黑白拍摄，无对白。有大量精心雕琢的长镜头：母亲为一个刚从寒风中归来的男人拍去棉袄上的灰尘；一群村民围着悬挂的猪的胴体磨刀。展览手册将其描述为“对人类精神生活的沉思”，以及“一个游离于现代性时空之外的另类时间性的隐喻”。乡愁、思乡、梦境的主题显而易见；在不同房间之间游走的体验，确实如同踏入了过去、现在与未来得以相互触碰的空间。

第二次重访展览时，录像装置中最令我印象深刻的，是每个拥有两块以上屏幕的房间，都在有意并置两类影像：一边是乡村日常生活的平凡场景，另一边则是某种异质的陌生感。一块屏幕上，一个女人照料着一头拴着的毛驴，进进出出；另一块屏幕上，一个戴摩托车头盔的男人从极低角度仰拍入画，身后是一座高耸入云、宛若宇宙飞船的巨型铜制共产主义雕塑。这两个镜头并排持续了将近两分钟。

再举一例：一个男人驱赶着牛穿越田野，摄影机从左到右缓缓跟随；另一块屏幕上，那对青年男女背对镜头，隔着房间后方的两面镜子互相凝视，直到男人踉跄着走出，穿上一件皮夹克。

这种并置稍嫌直白，却依然高度有效。农耕节律与日常生活世界的镜头扮演着某种客观外部现实的角色，而那些将人物置于奇异、不可能的背景中的超现实镜头，则承担起主观内心世界的功能——呈现关于英雄主义、性欲与逃离的渴望。另一块屏幕上，那对青年男女在一个形似农业排水系统尽头的空间相遇，随即拼命扯下彼此厚重的冬衣，在潮湿的地面上翻滚，头顶是拱形砖砌穹顶。还有一块屏幕，母亲站在两排废弃粗野主义建筑之间形成的走廊尽头，对面，一个骑摩托车的男人静静坐在那里——整个构图宛若直接取自德·基里科的画布；两人在这片异质空间中共处了异常漫长的时间，直到男人骑车离去。这些背景之所以有意义，恰恰在于它们在观众心中唤起的那种奇异的、非人的感受。

这类影像在整个展览中不断碰撞。杨福东追问的是：它们共存的可能性究竟在哪里？主客观世界之间的巨大张力，似乎导向了一个沉郁的结论：《香河》中那些人物的感官欲望与逃离冲动，终究无法战胜他们的物质处境。然而，这种痛苦具有某种超越性——它道出了“家”的情感地理将中国现代性的主体吸纳进一种游戏性的、充满欲望的存在状态的能力。归根结底，做梦本身，哪怕是徒劳的梦，也是一件好事。

展览的最后一块屏幕将这一主题画了个圆，将两种对立升华为一个梦境意象——我在笔记中亲切地将其称为“猪之幽灵”。在这里，我们第三次见到了猪。第一个房间里，它活着，肥硕嚣嚣的一团肉，淹没在猪圈的昏暗中。然后我们看到它悬挂在肉钩上。最后，当沸水浇在猪皮上时，我们看到了开膛破肚的过程。这个镜头既骇人又极度感官化。摄影机靠得太近，以至于操刀解猪腹的人的身体部分被画框遮挡。沸水在清晨的寒气中化作蒸汽，团团白雾在镜头中翻涌，将肠子、内脏、沿一柄巨大砍刀滑落的血一一揭示。这个镜头持续了将近五分钟。

在这里，我们看到欲望的科幻梦境与乡村生活的日常节律合并为一个影像；农活变成了某种超越自然秩序的存在，游离于历史时间之外。在那团翻涌的烟雾与蒸汽之中，一片由肉与死亡构成的异星景观浮现出来。这是那四个人物最终抵达的终点：浪漫与童年，欲望的悬置，最终化为那头猪——它被献祭，以确保时间能够向前滑动，肠胃得以填满。

杨福东是个彻底的相对主义者。他希望通过艺术记录他对世界的这种诠释。展览前期的某处，他的一段引言出现在墙上文字中，大意是：“我们每个人的梦都不同，经历的是不同的世界。我想通过我的作品延续这种感受，让每位观众在穿越我的作品时，都能得以窥见自己的梦。”以一部表面上讲述新年筹备故事的影片来传递这种相对主义的视角——而新年，是每个中国人都曾经历、且往往情感高度激荡的体验——这本身就是聪明的。每个人带着各自故乡的记忆走进那些黑暗的房间：不同年份，与不同亲人围坐，总在大致相同的框架之内，却又包含那些造就个体差异的细微不同。作为一个外国人，我只能以最抽象的方式感知这种相对主义——通过这样一个观念：共同的经历，恰恰是差异最丰沛的土壤。我的女友的反应印证了这一点，她对我说：“这些人为什么这么悲伤？我老家过年，大家笑得多了去了。”

这类感受，正是杨福东所期待的——关于农耕节律与其现代变体之间碰撞所激起的情感、记忆与乡愁的反思。众所周知，中国农历新年之所以叫“春节”，是因为它标志着冬日苦寒的终结，意味着必须回家，而在七天的庆典结束之后，春耕播种的仪式随即开始。然而，杨福东与策展团队也深知：“乡愁”（nostalgia）这个词的希腊语词根，正是“nostos”（归家）与“algos”（痛苦）的组合。在那欢庆之中，在那些笑容背后，有某种直抵骨髓的东西，在与现代生活方式的正面碰撞中，愈发锋利。

这一年，网络上“反向过年”的话题持续发酵——城里长大的孩子邀请父母来自己所在的都市过节。这股风潮背后，正隐藏着杨福东所传达的那种痛苦与奇异：失根之痛，归途的怪诞、不可能与转瞬即逝。当封建农耕的模式让位于某种全新之物，孝道也在摸索着新的形态。

杨福东在这个项目上三十年的投入，值得。

当我坐在最后一块屏幕前，看着猪的内脏扑落，一对情侣从出口方向走进了录像空间。男友端着一台大相机，女友穿着网格长筒袜。我曾见过他们穿行于之前的几个房间。女友跳到屏幕前，男友在她面前摆好机位。她回头望向镜头，一条腿微屈，做出一副刻意俏皮的pose。男友透过镜头审视了几秒，随即发出一声有些生硬的笑，说道：“不行，这背景太奇怪了。我以为黑白会好看，但感觉怪怪的。这些画面是什么东西啊，根本看不出来。不适合拍好看的照片，发出去效果不行。”女友跑过去，也尴尬地笑着，两人从来时的方向走了出去。

说得好，朋友。

Since his graduation in the mid-90s, he has taken his place as China’s most important video installation artist. His aesthetic sensibilities are agricultural-Y2K. His Wikipedia page describes his style as a combination of the nostalgia of Chinese ink wash handscrolls and Jim Jarmusch. His oil painting training seeps through everything he produces, not simply because he mostly shoots in black and white, but also in his interest in landscape, in lyricism, and in democratizing the obsession of traditional Chinese painting with the interior life of the intellectual by resituating it in a contemporary context of rural, humble life in China’s hinterlands.

Fragrant River is his most recent exhibition, and is exhibited at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China’s premier contemporary art museum, from November of last year until May of this one. It is an ode to his hometown, a small village in Hebei, the northern province of China which encircles Beijing. It is an industrialized, desert-like region, poor in comparison to many of its neighbors, and home to the majority of the migrant workers in Beijing. The wall text describes the exhibition as 30 years in the making, gestating within the mind of the artist since 1997. In 2016, Fudong took a team to the village to shoot for 47 days, and spent the subsequent 8 years on post-production. The outcome is seven hours of footage, split between 15 different channels on 15 different screens. Some of these are exhibited together, some in isolation.

In order to give the process of creating the video installation the respect it deserves, the first two-thirds of the exhibition space are dedicated to a series of photographs, paintings, and recordings that document both the literal work that went into producing the seven hours of footage as well as the more cerebral process of collecting and collating the themes that Yang Fudong wanted to communicate. It is an incredible piece of curation, especially if you go into the exhibition blind (like I did, on my first visit). After walking through three other video spaces, past several of the artist’s paintings from his school years, and past a set of surreal furniture pieces that appear in one of the most dream-like sequences of the video, one finally pulls aside a final set of curtains, which introduces “Fragrant River” as if for the first time. It is an exciting revelation and it makes it feel as if, after passing through the mind of the artist, you are finally confronted with the artifact that all the pain and strangeness of the previous images had gone into creating.

There are eight rooms in the video space, unlit and arranged in the manner of a maze. Each room contains one, two, or three screens, playing simultaneously. These tell a heavily-stylized story of four characters, a mother and a son, and a young woman and a young man, as the small town prepares for New Years celebrations. They are all shot in black and white, and there is no dialogue. There are long, painstaking shots of the mother dusting off the jacket of a man who has just come in from the cold, of a series of villagers sharpening knives while surrounded by a hanging pig carcass. The accompanying exhibition guide describes it as a “reflection on human spiritual life” and a “metaphor for an alternate temporality that stands apart from the space-time of modernity.” There are obvious themes of nostalgia, homesickness, and dreaming, and the experience of wandering through the different rooms really does seem like entering into a space where the past, present, and future are able to touch.

When I revisited the exhibition for the second time, the most notable feature of the video installation was that in every room where more than one screen was present, the playback seemed to explicitly juxtapose a quotidian scene of rural village life with a scene of alien strangeness. On one screen, a woman tends to a tied-up donkey, walking in and out of her house, on the other, a man in motorcycle helmet appears from an extremely low angle, backgrounded by a huge bronze Communist sculpture that reaches into the sky like a spaceship. These two shots go on for almost two minutes.

Another example: A man leads his ox through a field, as the camera rolls slowly from left to right to follow him. On the other screen, the young woman and young man stand with their backs to the camera, staring at each other through two different mirrors at the rear of the room, until the man stumbles out and puts on a leather jacket.

These contrasts are a bit on-the-nose, but nonetheless highly effective. The shots of agricultural rhythms and domestic lifeworlds play the role of an objective external reality, while the surreal shots of the characters against strange and impossible backdrops take on the role of a subjective interior world, depicting a desire for heroism, sexuality, and escape. On another screen, the young woman and young man meet in what looks like the end of an agricultural drainage system, before desperately pullinh off each other’s winter jackets as they roll on the wet ground, under a domed brick ceiling. On another, the mother stands at the end of a corridor between two rows of abandoned brutalist buildings, while a man on a motorcycle sits opposite her in a shot that looks straight out of a de Chirico painting; the two remain share this alien space for an exceptionally long time, until the man rides off. The background is meaningful only because it generates such a strange, inhuman feeling in the audience.

These kinds of images continue to collide throughout the exhibition. Yang Fudong asks the question about the possibility of their coexistence. The huge contrast between objective and subjective worlds seems to reach the somber conclusion that the sensual and escapist desires of the characters in Fragrant River will never be able to triumph over their material conditions. This pain, however, is transcendent in the sense that it speaks to ability of the affective geographies of “home” to subsume the subjectivity of Chinese modernity into a playful, desiring mode. In the end, the act of dreaming, even in futility, is a good thing.

The final screen of the exhibition brings this theme full-circle, sublimating the two oppositions into one dream image, which I affectionately described in my notes at the Ghost of the Pig. Here, we see a pig for the third time. In the first room, we saw it alive, a chubby squealing mass of flesh obscured by the darkness of it pen. Then we saw it hanging from a meat hook. And finally, as the skin is blasted with boiling water, we see it being disemboweled. This shot is horrific and deeply sensual at the same time. The shot is so close that the body of the human who is carving up the pigs stomach is partly obscured. The boiling water has turned into steam in the early morning chill, and clouds of vapor roll through the shot, revealing bowels, organs, blood pouring off a huge saber. This shot lasts for almost five minutes.

Here we see the science fiction dreamscape of desire and the mundane rhythms of rural life subsumed into one image; the farm chore becomes something beyond the realm of the natural, outside of historical time. Through those heaving clouds of smoke and vapor, an alien landscape of flesh and death emerges. This is the destination our four characters are heading for, where romance and childhood and the deferral of desire become simply the Pig, sacrificed to ensure that time can slide forwards, that stomachs are filled.

Yang Fudong is a radical relativist. He wants to document this interpretation of the world through his artwork. At one point in the build up to the video, a quote of his appears in a piece of wall text, saying something along the lines of “We all dream differently, and experience different worlds. I want to carry on this feeling through my artwork, allowing each audience member to peer into his or her own dreams as they move through my work.” To communicate this kind of relativistic perspective through a film that ostensibly tells the story of the preparation for the New Year festivities, something every Chinese person has experienced, and often in an emotionally heighted manner, is clever. Every person goes into those dark rooms with their own memories of their hometown, different years eating with different relatives, always more or less in the same rubric but containing the kinds of minute differences which give rise to individuality. From a foreigners perspective, I can see this relativism only in the most abstracted way, through the idea that shared experiences are actually the most generative of difference. My girlfriend reacted immediately in this manner, saying to me: “Why are these people so sad? In my hometown, the people smile much more during the New Year.”

These kinds of reflections are exactly what Yang Fudong wants, reflections on the emotions, memories, and nostalgias of a collision between agricultural rhythms and their modern instantiations. As many of you know, the Chinese New Year is called Spring Festival because it marks the end of winter hardship. It necessitates a return home, and at the end of seven days of celebration, the spring ritual of sowing the crop begins. But, Yang Fudong and the curators of the show also understand that “nostalgia” comes from the Greek roots of “nostos,” a return home, and “algos,” pain. Within the celebration, and within the smiles, something that cuts to the bone, all the more so for its confrontation with modern modes of living.

Trending on the internet this year has been the concept of the “Reverse New Year’s Celebration,” where metropolitan children will invite their parents to spend the week with them in their urban abodes. Within this internet trend is the pain and strangeness that Yang Fudong is communicating, the struggle of a deracinated life, the weirdness, impossibility, and transience of return. As feudal-agrarian patterns give way to something new, filial piety takes on new forms.

Yang Fudong’s 30 year investment in this project has been worth it. As I sat in front of the final screen, watching the guts fall out of the pig, a couple came into the video space through the exit. The boyfriend was holding a giant camera, and the girlfriend had on fishnet stockings. I’d see them traipsing through the previous rooms. The girlfriend jumped in front of the screen, and her boyfriend positioned himself in front of her. She stood looking over her shoulder, one of her knees bent in feigned whimsy. The boyfriend peered through his lens for a few seconds, then barked out strained laughter, and said, “Its not going to work. This background is too strange. I thought the black and white would look good, but its creepy. Who can even tell what those images are? Its not suitable for pretty pictures, they won’t look good online.” His girlfriend ran over to him, also laughing awkwardly, and they walked out the way they came in.

Well put, my friend.

When he was here, I asked him if he wanted to watch Bi Gan’s third film, 狂野时代 (kuángyě shídài), with me. The English title is Resurrection, but the Chinese translates literally to “The Wild Time.” He was in Beijing for work, making plans to bring mainland production houses closer to Taiwanese screenwriting and filming companies, and thus had been meeting with extensively with local filmmaking houses. He told me that no one he had talked to over the last week liked the movie, with many of Beijing producer fatcats resenting the fact that Bi Gan keeps getting funding. His previous two films, ‘Kaili Blues’ (路边野餐) and ‘A Long Day’s Journey into Night’ (地球最后的夜晚) have been the most successful indie/art movies in recent Chinese cinema, but make for heavy watching. Bi Gan’s style is obtuse, darkly humorous, and meandering. It has nonetheless captivated audiences with a stylized depiction, almost magic-realist in nature, of memories and aspirations in small-town, deindustrializing China.

The day before we watched the movie, we spent an afternoon with another of my girlfriend’s friends, who had announced that she knew my girlfriend wouldn’t make it to the end because she is an “S-type person,” a reference to the pseudoscience of the Meyers-Briggs personality test, which sorts human complexity into four binary oppositions. The “S” vs. “N” binary relates to the Observant and Intuitive personality types, present-focused as opposed to future-focused, capable of action as opposed to capable of abstract thought. That this binary is particularly upsetting to me should be obvious to the astute reader of this newsletter, the main point of which is the cultivation of the sociological imagination and the ability to think about the narrative and symbolic aspects of the human social experience. This is an ability that, very clearly, can be built, like a muscle. I take this very seriously. The idea that one could be proud to have an undeveloped capacity for abstract thought blows my mind.

This is a data scientist with a Master’s degree from an American university, and the whole thing makes me very depressed about education in general, and the state of status politics in China, because one of the great transformative ideals of education that I hold dear to my heart as a teacher is the cultivation of an openness to the world and the new and strange things which might emerge around us. Some people never get there, I guess, despite looking down on the kind of person who studies at the local Cadre College in Taiyuan, Shanxi, now renamed as Communication University of Shanxi, like Bi Gan did.

Resurrection is a 160-minute movie, containing five different narratives. The first is the frame story, about a monstrous hunchback referred to in Chinese as 迷魂着 (míhūnzhe, lit. ‘One who is dazed’). English-language reviewers refer to him as the Deliriant. As he stumbles towards his death in the 30-minute silent opening, text reveals that he lives in a future where humans have achieved immortality through giving up the ability to dream. As someone who has refused this bargain, he is hunted down by a 大她者 (dàtāzhě, lit. Great Other), a kind of “Dream Police,” tasked with finding those who’ve rejected these new conditions. Seeing the dying Dazed One, covered in decaying rose petals and struggling to close his eyes fully, this Great Other installs a projector in his back, allowing him finally to sleep and live out four different lives as they are projected out of his dreams. It is unclear if they are the same person, or simply the Dazed One projecting himself, psychologically this time, back into the different 20^th century time-periods he’d lived through.

The four lives are: a miscreant being pursued by a detective through a war-torn landscape, a thief co-opted into cleaning a Buddhist temple before being abandoned by his crew and coming face-to-face with a Spirit of Bitterness, a con-artist with mob ties who tries to play one more trick on his creditor with the help of a talented orphan, and a hoodlum who falls in love with prostitute/vampire on the last night of the 20th century, before being brutally beaten by her Cantonese pimp.

The film has been described as “resurrecting the 20^th century of Chinese cinema,” as an “extravagant act of surrender to the seductions of a century of cinema,” a “hallucinatory voyage,” a “love letter,” and a “glorious ode.” It is a highly referential film, a pastiche of influences, from Robert Wiene’s 1920 “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” and Peter Bogdonovich’s 1973 “Paper Moon.” As others have noted, there are sets and characters immediately reminiscent of Welles’ “The Lady from Shanghai,” de Palma’s “Scarface,” Wong Kar-Wai’s “Fallen Angels,” Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” and Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s “The Assassin.” One name conspicuously absent from the reviews has been Zhang Yimou, the choreographer of the 2008 Olympics and a mainstay of the “Fifth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers. Since around 2010, he has chosen to shoot almost exclusively Cultural Revolution films. His early realism and transition to dark comedy and martial arts were well-received across the globe; his last ten films have been almost universally panned.

I used to agree with the anti-Yimou camp. Since I’ve lived in Beijing, however, I’ve done a 180. I don’t really know what has converted me. Maybe it is simply understanding that there is less abstraction in the Chinese language than in English and therefore capable of enjoying Zhang’s symbolist literal-mindedness and a straightforward aesthetics of playful spectacle. But it is inarguable to me now. His cheesiness lends his work heft and staying power. The pomp and camp and sentimentality of his films may not speak to an audiovisual truth, but they present an imaginative, ambitious attempt to draw the heightened sentiments of the history of Chinese narrative media into a modern idiom. Among his recent films, The Great Wall (长城), starring Matt Damon and CG aliens, is a clearly a modern masterpiece, as is Cliff Walkers (悬崖之上), a historical film about the WW2 Japanese puppet-state and a tiny, idol-like female spy, and of course, so is Shadow (影), a fictionalized telling of a lethal Three Kingdoms-era prince getting in touch with his feminine side, shot in the style of an ink painting. I’ve rewatched each of the three in the last year, and although I still can’t bring myself to sit through the eight other Cultural Revolution films he’s released since 2010, I feel myself getting closer to the elevated state of consciousness which will allow me to do so every passing week. They are silly films. But this does not mean they don’t get the people going.

I watched “Impression Dahongpao” at Wuyi Mountain in 2023, a piece of “landscape performance” very similar to the 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremony which Zhang also directed, except that the platform upon which the 1000-person audience sit rotates four times around a 360-degree axis, revealing four discrete sets with hundreds of dancers each and a huge lightshow which plays against the distant craggy mountains, all to tell the mythical history of a tea leaf from Fujian province. For those of you who want to insist that propaganda=bad=unenlightened, there is nothing I can do to cure you of your idea that you lie above and beyond all ideology, sitting in your pure white rooms dedicated to the worship of crystalized aesthetics as they take the form of Black Panther 2 and One Battle After Another.

Zhang’s martial arts masterpieces of Hero (英雄, 2002) and House of the Flying Daggers (十面埋伏, 2004) were some of the first full-length movies I watched at home before the age of 10, and are inarguably beautiful. But Zhang’s feud with a controlling business partner of 20 years from who he’s won over 3 million RMB of damages across three lawsuits make him only more likeable to me. History is representation, mundane and spectacle at the same time. It takes someone like Zhang to remind of us this. His fascination with choreography, political messaging, and huge set pieces reveals a deep commitment to drama, to landscape, to the ability of the techniques of both the body and of film, once properly scaled up, to speak to the gestalt primal sentiments of nation-building in the face of a deadly geography and innumerable ethnic differences. Someone must carry the message of the times, however dull, artless, or repetitive it is. It is clear that Resurrection is influenced by Zhang as well, and not just in its sweeping historical scope. Slow, shaky manual 90 degree pans from one perfectly constructed framing of a temple façade to another perfectly framed mountain backdrop, the Great Other literally climbing over and peering through a miniaturized set of an Opium Den, complete with tiny actors running around her ankles in an MC-Escher-like visual illusion, a mirror-room chase filled with practical methods of hiding the camera, Bi Gan’s cinematography constantly seeks to generate a 3D sense of space, where the body and explicitly the eyes, are taken very seriously. In an interview he gave for Resurrection, Bi even states directly, “We’ve never been very good at traversing dreams in this land.”[1] It is a direct invocation of Zhang’s themes: nationalism, geography, movement.

Each one of Bi Gan’s films features a long take. This time, it is the last shot of the movie, a 36-minute party sequence that introduces us to the hooligan, his vampire lover, and their menacing Hong Kong pimp. It is actually shot over five hours, with a four and a half hour timelapse inserted into the middle that ensures the final shot of the movie, as our two lovers get on a river boat to sail away, takes place against the first sunrise of the 21^st century. During the timelapse, the camera is left on a window-sill, peering into a plaza where an outdoor party is being held. Revelers drink champagne, in what seems to be a four hour break for the entire production staff. Behind the party is an outdoor projector screen, where Louis Lumière’s 1895 “L’Arroseur Arrosé” (“Tables Turned on the Gardener”), one of the earliest narrative films, plays. While everything else moves at 24x, the images on this projector miraculously move at original speed, giving the real audience an ability to watch this movie that the fake audience lack. After 60 seconds of this, someone picks up the camera (four hours later in real time) to reveal the hooligan lying in a pool of his own blood, beaten within an inch of his life, lying the whole time right under the window that we have been looking out of, just a camera tilt away. I still can’t tell if they did this practically, slowing down the black and white projection to the point where 4.5 hours would correspond with 60 seconds of real action, or if they did it graphically, replacing a white screen with a moving image. Either way, it is just another virtuosic element of a virtuosic long take.

The whole process is tightly choreographed and reminiscent of Zhang Yimou’s best work, and it is a pleasure to watch the actors realize they are running a few seconds late to their next stop, where they need to dance to the music of an alarm at the port that the hooligan had set himself 5 hours earlier, and really peel off through the narrow alleys, running for real, forcing a stumbling cameraman to try to make up the awkward distance that has now emerged between the lens and the subjects of the frame. When the vampire and the hooligan make it to the port just in time for the music and burst into laughter and fall into one another’s arms, the relief is genuine. Bi Gan has stated they shot for six hours before sunrise every night for a month.

This alarm sequence is one of many moments of epiphany scattered throughout the film. The most consequential is the discovery that each of the four sub-stories references one specific senses. Many English-language reviews treat this as if it is obvious and laid out for the audience from the get. Far from it. This is one of the most pleasurable aspects of the film, but the structural significance of this aesthetic gesture is only revealed to the attentive watcher once the whole is made complete. The miscreant stabs a detective through the ear drum, who proceeds to deafen himself by stabbing his other ear in order to retain his ability to play Bach on a magic theremin. The thief has a toothache, and uses a stone to wrench out the offending tooth, before realizing that another man had peed on the stone a few minutes prior. He spits and throws his tooth over a wall. The Spirit of Bitterness comes climbing back over, revealing that he’d been living in the thief’s tooth. The conman and his orphan friend develop a rigged card game, winning money from others by betting the girl can tell a card only through smell. The vampire admits to having never bitten anyone before, and at sunrise she finally tastes and touches her hooligan boyfriend. The frame story itself is visual, as the metaphor of the projector makes clear. The Great Other seems to know we are watching, and as she explores a world of visual spectacle and illusion, where lines of sight are constantly obscured, she often casts a fourth-wall-breaking eye in our direction.

The references to sense seem obvious when laid out like this, but in the film they are subtle, and it took me until the third sub-story to begin piecing this structural through-line together. Other reviewers look to the sensorial content of each story as symbolic referents to different periods in the history of 20^th century cinema; the violence of the first sub-story is about the “technological ruptures of the sound era,” the olfactory con of the third sub-story is about “the heart of movie illusions – can a mirage ever obtain substance?” You should reject this overt Symbolism. The reveal of the sensorial through-line functions instead as an epiphany, where the audience is suddenly made aware of Bi Gan’s aesthetic gesture and each version of the Dazed One is guided towards self-knowledge and the resolution of different historical conflicts through their respective sense.

The master architect of epiphany as aesthetic technique is James Joyce. He wanted, in pseudo-theological terms, to provoke a realization of the essence of the world as separated from its phenomenological character. In Thomas Aquinas words, this is quidditas, the non-empirical “whatness” of the world. Joyce utilizes the self-consciousness of the mind to develop his aesthetic gesture, a form of double “realization,” the first on the part of the characters, the second on the part of the audience, which allows him to approach a modernist ideal of the representation of subjectivity. S.L. Goldberg wrote that, in this way, a steady stream of epiphanies passed on to the reader through passive stream of consciousness contributes to the impression that the reader himself “creating the characters and structure of the book…” through a process of mutual discovery.[2]

The meaning of Bi Gan’s aesthetic gesture, however, is more up in the air. I’m partial to a perspective that treats it like a Joycean “stream-of-sensation,” where the viewer just needs to relax into their own immersion, taking the reins of the storytelling. The orphan gives her conman accomplice a riddle at one point in their story: “What is something one person can do, but two can’t?” He knows all the answers to her riddles, unfortunately, and replies with “Dream.” Cinema can be a communal experience, trapped in the dark with so many other breathing bodies, more or less sensorially aware of their presence, but ultimately is something you experience on your own. You’re by yourself. See what you sense, how you feel.

Another reviewer wrote that the Great Other is slowly killing the Dazed One by stripping him of one sense at a time. This is provocative, and lends itself to a reading of a compassionate murder where the Dazed One is guided through a few last sensations before death. But I think this makes the connection between all the stories too literal; they are dreams, as Bi Gan has himself explained, and therefore they have no connection to each other than to massive, invisible, sublimated consciousness from which they are derived, which floats far, far above these unconscious dreamscapes: the consciousness of 20^th century cinema, which finds its natural conclusion as the oneiric quality of evening gives way to the lucidity of the first morning of the 21^st century in the last shot.

Bi Gan’s sensorium diverges from Joyce’s in its phantasmagoric, phenomenological quality, but Joyce is interested in establishing the main character of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, through a series of sensorial metonyms as well, each of which continues to emerge over the course of the novel as anchors for the technique of epiphany mentioned above; the bowler hat (sight), the newspaper (sound), the cigar (smoke and smell), lemon soap (smell again), flowers (lotuses, daisies etc.), organ meat (taste, smell). These moments are scattered throughout the text for our discovery, to contemplate the sensorial obsessions of a horny guy as they differentiate him from the preoccupations of his surroundings, through epiphany, “Oh, the flower again!,” that guides us towards our own reflections on identity and its material components. Bi Gan is focused on sensation itself, rather than an appraisal of essence, but like Joyce scatters fragments of a thought throughout the film for us to find.

English-language reviewers missed epiphany as technique by simply naming the sensorial through-line of the movie, eager to fold the film into familiar science fiction categories and therefore skipping out on a discussion on how this through-line was experienced in the theater. I feel that these same reviewers also misunderstand the point of Bi Gan’s fixation on sensation. In regard to this question, Joycean/Thomist concepts only take us so far. It is a Chinese film and therefore needs to be understood in the context of Chinese aesthetics. I didn’t have to look very far to find this. The school I work at used to be a pioneering educational reform leader. One of the first things our old principal did was to replace the homeroom system with a “Residential House” model (书院), where students would form self-generated academic communities. These residential houses were given suitably nerdy names, two of which are 格物 (géwù) and 致知 (zhìzhī). These names are derived from the Neo-Confucian Ming Dynasty statesman Wang Yangming. His work revolves around synthesizing Confucian beliefs around self-cultivation with a broader understanding of intellectual and moral investigation, and has seen a resurgence in recent years, as Chinese historians of science attempt to retell the story of the beginnings of science in the Ming Dynasty.[3]

Wang Yangming was a major figure in the 心学 (xīnxué) school, or School of the Heart. The Neo-Confucianists of the Song and Ming dynasties were rationalist and secular scholars who wanted to reinvigorate Tang dynasty Confucian ideas about governance whilst simultaneously stripping them of their overtly spiritual overtones. [4] For the Neo-Confucianists, metaphysics was a path towards a rationalist ethical philosophy of both governance and personal enrichment, and needed to be packaged this way in order to safeguard these cultural inheritances from the disruption of the Mongols. The School of the Heart wanted to rationalize self-cultivation, yoking it to an intellectual mastery of the natural world rather a spiritual endeavor to immortalize the soul.

Gewu and Zhizhi were crucial parts of Wang Yangming’s thought. Classically, 格gé can mean both “to arrive at” and “to obstruct.” Today, its meaning is closer to frame, rule, or standard. 物wù means the objective world outside the self. The first 致zhì means “to expand” or “to reach out,” and the second 知zhī means knowledge. The goal of géwù – zhìzhī is to arrive at 理lǐ, the coherence or pattern of the universe. Géwù refers to an orientation of the self towards the world through a phenomenological approach to personal experience, and zhìzhī to a more straightforward expansion of moral capacity through the study of the classics. Together, these build towards 良知 (liángzhī), an intuitive knowing which can also be called conscience. This draws towards metaphysics because 物wù can mean anything unknown to the self, including what the unconscious, God, etc. In this way, self-cultivation became a path towards developing a socially productive conscience, which oriented one towards the ultimate goal of building the coherence of human affairs. Today, these terms have been replaced in the common lexicon by 科学kēxué, science.

At any moment, 良知 (liángzhī), inherent to all humans, can be corrupted by bad learning, bad desires, and bad morals. Thus, the Study of the Heart is the continual pursuit of a clear, clean conscience. Géwù – zhìzhī contributes a moral aspect to quidditas, the appraisal of the whatness of objects, in terms of how to make sense of obligation in relation to the objective world. Which brings us back to the sensorial misreading. Bi Gan’s obsession with sensation as a structuring through-line is not about intelligibility, violence, numbness, or symbol. Although the film is preoccupied by the past and by dreaming, sensation in the film should not be subsumed by Western intellectual concepts that are commonly deployed to deal with the above two themes: namely, a psychoanalytic/scientific approach to memory, a return of the repressed, the medical terminology that describes lack of sensation ie. blindness, deafness, etc. It is not connected with science as we think about it today, an exploration of the “reality” of phenomena that are corrupted by our sensing organs.

Instead, sensation is part of a phenomenological pursuit of coherence, literally, listening to your feelings in order to know the world. For the obsessive Bi Gan, this is the world of 20^th century cinema, and although it all literally is just light on a screen, this film presents the argument that film is in fact an all-consuming universe, full of touch and smell and taste. And finally, this knowing of the world, this attention to sensation, is a moral act. Your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin are guides towards moral conduct, towards clean conscience. The criminal aspect of each of the protagonists of the sub-stories is all the more relevant; each, in their final moment, orients themselves towards the truth of the world through their senses.

The train criminal refuses to be turned into a weapon of mass destruction, turning instead towards music. The thief is able to purge his guilt towards the death of his father from rabies by assisting the Spirit of Bitterness with a reincarnation ritual, reflecting on sweetness of his own life. The con-man, about to get out of dodge, is consumed by love for his sidekick while reading a joke she wrote about farts, goes back for her, and dies for his affection. And the hooligan allows himself to accompany, through touch, his vampire lover into eternal life, even if it means being relegated to an eternal underclass existence.

We all have the capacity for innate abstract comprehension, 良知 (liángzhī), within us. It only needs to be defended from corrupting influences like a data science undergraduate degree or the bigotry of Chinese regionalism. Sensation is knowing the world. It is an orientation towards conscience which elevates the individual above the barbarity of callousness and into a realm of social obligation. Redemption is lying in each and every feeling moment, each and every tiny moral action that these feelings inspire.

This is why Bi Gan keeps getting money. What he is doing is not some kind of homage to the history of cinema. It is brand new, and it is carving a new moral orientation into the landscape of Chinese cinema. It is about feeling the world, at a time when many Chinese young people are working backbreaking, unfeeling white-collar hours, numbing themselves on the subway home with short-form videos, doing everything they can to avoid the claustrophobic, air-conditioned, mediated sensations they are inundated with. In this regard, my girlfriend’s friend is the intended audience of this film, the person who most needs to watch it in the world.

In the same interview where he mentioned the difficult of traversing dreams, Bi Gan also stated, “Every time I shoot a film, I get really, really scared beforehand, because I know I’ll be half alive. It’s like in my home town, a funny thing happens. When people have to take the bus winding around the mountains, they’ll get carsick the day before just thinking about it.” The sickness of the anticipation of a changing world, of the sacrifice it takes to capture experience in its rawest form – this is what the rest of us need, and what Bi Gan gives us.

[1] Zhou, Dennis. “Bi Gan’s Dream Factory.” The New Yorker, 12 Dec. 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/bi-gans-dream-factory.

[2] Goldberg, Samuel L. The Classical Temper: A Study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. 3. impr, Chatto & Windus, 1969.

Hendry, Irene. “Joyce’s Epiphanies.” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, no. No. 3, Sept. 1946, pp. 449-67.

[3] He Bian and Yingtian He, “Science (Gewu) in Late Imperial China,” Encyclopedia of the History of Science (February 2025) doi: doi.org/10.34758/8bgj-xc23

[4] Chan, Wing-tsit, and Carsun Chang. “Wang Yang-Ming: Idealist Philosopher of Sixteenth- Century China.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 82, no. 3, July 1962, p. 458. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2307/597686.

One of the most difficult-to-comprehend statistics about professional tennis is time between shots, which on the Tour comes out to an average of 1.2 seconds. This means that each player on the court is hitting the ball every 2.4 seconds. The ATP has published a few statistics for the Tour average forehand speed and backhand speed: 121kph and 108kph respectively. From this, we can come up with the speeds of 33.6 meters per second for the forehand and 30.0 meters per second for the backhand. Considering a tennis court is 23.77 meters long, and taking into consideration the arcing nature of tennis shots, the angle they are hit at, and the distance players stand behind the baseline, a bit over a second in between shots seems to make sense. For some context into the difficult of this act, watch a clock, and imagine hitting a ball every time a hand shifts two seconds forward.

Alcaraz and Sinner hit the ball around 8kph faster than the tour average, but are outdone slightly by Dimitrov and Rublev on the forehand and Zverev on the backhand wing. Nonetheless, they still consistently rank in the top five on each side. In terms of RPM, or rotations per minute, Ruud and Dimitrov out-spin them as well off both wings. This leaves us with a bit of dilemma. Sinner is 5 and 1 against Dimitrov, 7 and 3 against Rublev, and 4 and 0 against Ruud. Alcaraz is 4 and 2 against Dimitrov, 4 and 1 against Rublev, and 5 and 1 against Ruud. The “Big Two” have won 8 out of the last 8 Grand Slams, and 9 out of the last 10, only being interrupted by Novak Djokovic in Flushing Meadows in 2023. How is this possible?

The conclusion many are in the midst of drawing is that it is their athleticism, movement, and point construction that allow them to hit a level that no one else seems to be able to match. In simple terms, this means they are able to get in hitting position faster, get into better hitting positions, and hit higher quality balls into more-difficult-to-retrieve locations from any spot on the court. They are obviously lightning fast, but maybe not as fast in a 10m or 40m dash than players like Alex DeMinaur or Tommy Paul, who seem to be a half-step ahead of the rest of the tour on defense. Nonetheless, nobody matches them in shot creation ability whilst on the move, as watching any highlight video of the two from the last two years will tell you. This was a common theme among the peak Nadal years as well, an unrivalled ability to hit passing shots or turn defense into offense from impossible positions. It was also a theme among the top u18 junior players in Southern California while I was growing up. Almost without exception, the best players were the best movers, and moreover the best at coming up with shots while disadvantaged.

However. We’ve lost something from the game. I’m not talking about Rafa’s fighting spirit, or Roger’s grace. It is much simpler and less abstract, and is contained within the figure of the third of the big Three. It is hatred, the kind that Novak Djokovic inspired in Federer in the early years, the kind that he had for some US Open crowds, the kind that the gerontocrats had for him when he didn’t want to take a vaccine. He is not friends with the other two, despite their own bromance. Rafa has avoided him after retirement; Roger treats him the way you treat a wolf that you’ve been assured is not wild anymore.

He is still around for Alcaraz and Sinner, but a 38-year-old cannot hate a 22-year-old, and they can’t hate him. He is so clearly the third best player in the world, and contains within himself so much more substance than the other two currently hold within their wiry frames. He has obviously been on a kind of holy warpath right now, not against other humans but against time itself, seeing if he can reverse not only the slowly declining quality of his returns but also the strains and sorenesses that seem understandable for a man approaching his 40s. And he has no time for the other two. They only represent the new human horizon that he is attempting to supersede. The other two don’t have a comparable thing inside them which compel them back onto the court.

Alcaraz is beautiful, all tan and all muscle and all instinct and clearly enjoying his physical supremacy. He is a genius of variation, knowing he will be intense and more wily than anyone he comes up against, and therefore knowing he doesn’t need to think very much. His smile is pure, and authentic in its naivete.

Sinner holds a working-class quietness and dignity within himself, a love for his family and awkwardness with verbal expression that the bourgeoisie would have mocked and taken as a sign of his intellectual inferiority two centuries ago. He is a good Zoomer: he likes video games, and activism, and is a loving acolyte of his coach, Darren Cahill. And he is handsome as well, and a Gucci model now. Here in China, with the rise of tennis among urbanite youth, the two have become heart throbs in a way that foreign athletes of other sports cannot replicate.

Who else were heart throbs? Look at these pictures of young Roger and young Rafa.

Think about the endorsements they took. Think about the way they engaged with fashion, about how they redefined male beauty for the sportsman; the crystal class of the Swiss Alps, the unkempt, sun-scorched quality of Mallorca. Novak never fit into their model. He never could partake in the eroticism of their friendship, or of their public image. He has always been their counterpoint, a figure of contradiction and controversy, never accepted by the public or his peers. And this generated a heat within the tour that is gone. I cannot listen to one more acceptance speech by whichever of the two, Alcaraz or Sinner, wins the next Slam, about how handsome his opponent was, about how he pushes him to be not only a better player but a better man, how their friendship off the court is as genuine as their rivalry on the court, about how they like the other’s haircut. I will throw up. Rather than contrivance, sports needs villainry, it needs rage, its needs hatred, it needs irrationality. It is the only place where these parts of our social experience can be expressed, and absorbed without disgust by spectators. Its why Lebron, despite achieving so much more than Michael, will never take his place in the history books, with his whining and his Twitch appearances and his stupid new brand collaborations.

It was always this darkness that drew me to Novak as a teenager. Embattled, rebellious, messing with his opponents rhythm in the most cynical, in-your-face nastiness. A middle-finger, an f-you, followed up with an unparalleled, honey-tongued eloquence and a supernatural ability to be better than everyone else without ever appearing to be a better tennis player. This was a true, mythical darkness, a closeness with something more powerful, more complex, than the human mind could handle. It was a negation of the world of the other two, their contrived dialectical opposition, blue and red eclipsed by black. It came complete with all the bullshit about crystals and ancient giants. The more Djokovic won, the more likely it seemed that there actually was something the rest of us didn’t understand, and to be honest, wouldn’t it be sick if it was giants and enormously powerful burial mounds somewhere in Europe.

I retain a hope that this hatred will slowly bubble up from somewhere in the next few years. Maybe not within the figures of our inane Big Two. Maybe it will have to come some Oedipal drama in the Ben Shelton camp, a divorce between father and son who seem to be far too close for comfort. Maybe it will come from Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, utilizing his 6’8” height and his bad looks to prove that technique, control, or prettiness are no longer necessary in tennis. Maybe the other two will grow up, develop something nasty within themselves that the rest of us can savor. Whatever happens, just remember, Alcaraz’s “happiness,” Sinner’s “sincerity,” these are not serious traits, they do not make up serious, transcendent figures of physical mastery. In the words of Logan Roy, they are not serious people.

He looks fit and extremely tan, and has something of a scraggly haircut but is by no means ugly. He glowers at passersby, and perhaps it is something of this outward projection of will which keeps him from being escorted out or arrested.

The second is an elderly woman, perhaps in her 70s. She sleeps in a little covered electric tricycle that reeks. The inside is completely filled with soiled fabrics and giant plastic water containers. Every day at 7:05am (I know this because it is also when I exit my apartment building to get to morning class) she descends the elevator into the subway station with an armful of flowers, where she sets up a piece of cardboard, a WeChat code, and a display of dying flowers before falling asleep next to them. She wears a light white and red polyester jacket, the uniform of our community middle school. The subway station sends a steward to stand next to her, and these men often seem willing to get close to this woman, perhaps because she seems less dangerous when she is lying face-down on the tiles. She is not dead, because she leaves when the subway closes at 10:55pm and goes back to her tricycle.

My parents live in a wealthy suburb of Southern California, on a hill populated exclusively by bookworms – the university housing residences. A few years ago there was some hubbub about a homeless man who was using the community pool shower every morning between 6:30 and 7am, jumping the five-foot fence. Somebody called ‘Campus Police™’ on him, and we heard he was bus-ed into Santa Ana. What kind of deal the city government made must’ve been a strange one.

I saw the woman again this morning. She shuffled into the elevator after me, turning around and leaning her head into the corner. When the doors opened, she waited, motionless, for everyone else to get off before her.

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I spent this Friday afternoon at a newly opened park in Southern Beijing, near the South Railway station. I lay on some stones with my shirt pulled over my belly and read my novel. Elderly folk were practicing musical instruments and taking naps. Schoolkids on a trip sketched trees. It was a bright, dry, breezy day, where the sky feels very far off – as Beijing gives way to its golden fall, we have a few final scorches of summer days that scud off into cool, buggy evenings.

These park experiences are their own kind of urban sublime – experiences enabled only by the agglomeration of individuals and the collective will to enact green within the grey. The high, leafy trees frame these white bridges that cross a small lake, but behind all loom first a layer of new apartment buildings and then the arcing metal of the skyscrapers of the downtown commerce center.

In the past, parks and gardens have been a crucial part of the Chinese cultural imagination. I don’t know much about the other Chinese cities, but in Beijing there are obvious examples – the Summer Palace, for one, with a history dating to the Jurchen-led Jin Dynasty (c.1153 BCE) of being an Imperial Resting spot. The 2.9 square kilometers house several gardens, one of which is designed in imitation of the Lion Grove Garden in Suzhou, a 14^th century masterpiece of landscape design. The Olympic Park is a more recent example, and today still functions as a kind of hub along the Imperial Axis for sport and outdoor activity. These two sites alone retain an importance to Beijing that Central Park will never have – endpoints of cross-country migrations for hundreds of millions of domestic tourists, UNESCO World Heritage sites, subjects of intense urban-planning and historical scrutiny.

The Chinese Liberal Arts department of our school assigns a Garden Analysis Project at the end of the second semester of our students first year. This involves a multi-week scaffolding process on form, poesis, microcosm, and affective aesthetics in Chinese intellectual history, and culminates in the project where students must construct model of a personal garden that reflects something about their inside world. The students, inexplicably, hate this. In every graduating class of 120, we have about two or three who plan to major in the humanities. The rest go to the sciences or social sciences. I can understand that poesis, even explained in the context of rocks and ponds and bugs, might be annoying because of the difficulty and effort involved in grappling this concept at the age of 16. Some of the other Chinese teachers scoff at this project as well – thinking it boils down simply to papier-mâché and glue skills. I suppose the CLA teachers want to ground their teaching in something they believe is both relatable (the outdoors) and connected with a lineage of humanistic Chinese thought (the sublimity of gardens). This is an assignment that you would never see in an American literature class, even at a private school with an open curriculum. I think it is a wonderful assignment, but too much intellectual history (obviously) will produce a response of rebellion in teenagers.

I remember taking a course during my Anthropology degree in London called “Social Construction of Landscapes.” I was perturbed to find out we’d have a week on Islands, and then another week on Stones, and then another week on Peri-Urban Domestic Gardens and the Construction of “Britishness.” After I grew some balls, I realized, as I’m sure all of you have already, that it was sick class, and it had a serious impact on my understanding of the exploratory potential of intellectual engagement. My initial confusion with this class is explained by the landscape of my childhood – the manicured boob-like semi-spherical bushes of Irvine didn’t quite inspire the same historical consciousness that this ancient professor had.

But my openness to the topic came from my initiation into the critical distancing of anthropology necessary to grapple with taken-for-granted concepts, a distance I am afraid my STEM students will never be able achieve in relation to this garden project, influenced as they are by college-application-presentism and a hatred for the playful, high-handed, contemptuous humanistic intellectual that they inherit from Mao, who thought his proletarian poems saved him from this identity.

Let’s investigate some of this garden-inspiration. From Zhang Heng (張衡), polymath, cartographer, and hydraulic engineer, born in the 1^st century BCE,

Plains and swamps are overgrown with verdure
And the hundred grasses become rank and thick.
The kingly osprey flaps its wings;
The orioles wail mournfully—
Their necks entwined, fluttering,
They call to each other in tender notes.
Thus happily I roam and play,
My feelings to cherish… [excerpted]

(translation by William Neinhauser in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature: Volume 1 [1986])

to Tao Qian (陶潛), a local politician and eventual hermit born in the 4^th century,

[excerpted] …Fluttering, the flying birds
Rest on the branches of my garden tree.
Scratching their feathers, they sit
And harmonize sweetly.
I have many friends
But I think most of you.
I want to talk with you, but you are not to be found.
How I resent it!

(translation by AllPoetry.com)

and finally to the Kangxi Emperor himself, 1400 years later,

The carp leap, their scales like growing grass.
Honeysuckle vines brocade depths,
This sacred enclosure celebrates the heavens, with joy.
Imperial edicts, wise, elegant, fill a volume.

(translation by myself, just a few minutes ago, lol)

gardens serve as locations in which the divine is channeled through (sentimental) poetry. The reader can make his or her own judgement on whether there has been aesthetic progress or not. Vaunted as both immanent, philosophical manifestations of political or aesthetic harmony, and as containing a beauty that evades capture by words, Chinese intelligentsia have developed a nature-based aesthetic in what might be compared (by an amateur, like me) to the Pastoral genre in Western literary and visual arts. They function as a container for the values of the society in which they have been created: the idyll of self-sustenance and peregrination for Pastoralism, and the idyll of the gestalt of natural beauty channeled towards human ends for garden poetry.

Post-industrially, green spaces have become pivot points for sustainable urban planning, for policy research into urban quality of life, for psychological studies of anomie, or for environmental scientists. The two charts included below give me the impression that I have it pretty good in Beijing – and the articles I stole them from are worth reading here and here.

I take the elevator into the subway because I want to avoid the triple escalator which draws me into my neighboring shopping mall. The lower one descends the hotter it gets, before the station AC kicks in, and the scent of yogurt drinks and freshly made rice rolls sink quickly into ones pores.

I can’t help but feel that, especially in the beautiful fall, these two vagrants would be better off enjoying the non-commercial open space that is so abundant in this city. Despite many of the more famous scenic locations hiding behind gates (often with ticket prices of .10-.25 cents, I guess to subsidize renovation costs), there must be better places to bum it out than in this sanitized, mid-tier shopping mall surrounded by mid-tier yuppies and young families. But I suppose that it is easily surmised, from the stricter policing found in parks compared to malls, that they are here simply because they feel more welcome in the zone of exchange, the phantasmagoric commodity spectacle, despite having nothing to trade themselves, than in the more publicly oriented zones of activity in Beijing. This is an interesting reversal of expectations, the unhoused protected by the anonymity of the commodity, the delicate balance of cadres concerned with public decency, and mall management worried about social media representations and the poor connotation of police presence.

But seeing them has been the affective experience of the week for me, and I am constantly tossed into a roiling sea of sadness, physical aversion, and shock twice a day on my commute. The lines on their face, the reactions of the somnolent commuters stepping around them, the way they hold their bodies when they move. Much more than the garden that I wish they could enjoy and that pleased ancient Chinese poets so much, they have inspired my own aesthetic sensibilities, and were I a poet I suppose I’d try to channel this into the constraints of form and microcosm, but alas I only write non-fiction.

I introduce the vibe of this series, titled “Outworkings and Working Out” with Ezra Pound’s high modernist translation of Li Bai (b. 701) – an example of both individual greatness in the absence of linguistic skill and the timelessness of aesthetic value:

And high over the willows, the fine birds sing to each other, and listen,

Crying “Kwan, Kuan” for the early wind, and the feel of it – Ezra Pound

上有好鳥相和鳴

間關早得春風情 – 李白

The second series will be concerned with youth politics. This will mostly also be filtered through art objects, but will engage with political attitudes, political economics, and what kind of new people we need to become. This is certainly not limited to a young audience – generations and their contradictions are best understood by those who have the most points of comparison. The first post will be about the Japanese literature, the immigration of Chinese youth to Japan, and the political significance of the impending contact.

In Irvine, the most intellectually engaged and tormented of my high school friends indulged me on the topic of political engagement with her own thoughts on libertarianism and the need to slap the political somnolence out of young women in America. As a Marxian newsletter, we will not engage with the process of unpacking this idea – and as a man who doesn’t aspire to be a pimp, I don’t want to either – but I take it generally as a sign that the question of what kind of political subjects our generation needs to become is alive in America.

There are serious difficulties in producing revolutionary subjectivities to struggle against the gerontocrats and Boomers and Gen-Xers who retain a stranglehold on the New York Times and the Senate and tenure-track positions and ambassadorships and Hollywood exec roles and Big Five editorships. In 2016, when I was in high school in California, history resumed – but in a sick knife to the ribs, nine years later Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters are still in office. Diane Feinstein believed she had the Mandate of Heaven and took it to the grave, dying two years ago, in office, at the age of 90.

The DOGE kids were a dramatic and impotent outworking of this youth frustration against our inability to participate in the political changes happening over our heads. Other historical periods marked by similar levels of geopolitical instability and change contrast with ours because of the importance of young people during these periods in reforging institutions, forcibly demanding change, and wresting responsibility from the decrepit and rotting.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo describes one such period: the fall of the House of Bourbon to Garibaldi’s redshirts and the subsumption of the Two Sicilies into a modern Italy. I read the book this spring, and just finished watching the 1963 movie and the 2025 Netflix adaptation. I’ve been fascinated by the figure of the Prince and his nephew, Tancredi – and, consumed by envy. Their connection with history seems so much more direct than ours, and despite the incredible ways that they compromise themselves morally in order to advance the career of the young man and the sadness he seems set to inherit, there is something vital and appealing about the channeling of one’s full essence, not just the intellect, into scrabbling for position.

In the novel, Tancredi’s courtship of the nouveau riche Angelica Sedara is depicted in a haunting game of hide-and-seek through the abandoned back rooms of his uncle’s country palazzio. Lampedusa ends the sweltering and horny scene with a switch to an omniscient perspective, noting that the two lovers will never have such happiness again in their lives – this immanent and almost objectless desire, at once sexual and completely abstracted, is pure pleasure – they stand at the precipice of falling into the future. Once their desire has been realized, there is only the poison, betrayal, and disappointment of history. During the hide-and-seek, the cheating and the scandal and the lack of affection that their participation in history necessitates seems far away. For the granddaughter of a goat farmer and a penniless orphan, striding to the forefront of Italian history seems to be worth any price.

Visconti’s movie does not do voice-over, and thus focuses exclusively on the experience of this mutual hunt. He doesn’t dwell on their future dissatisfaction – instead posing the more politicized question for his Tancredi – 80 years later, would he have become a Fascist? Fascism loves animal metaphors almost as much as this movie – the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the eagle’s nest, the lion, the wolf. In a piece of dialogue, the Prince of Salina, Tancredi’s uncle, mourns the bourgeois revolution, stating that the Leopard will be replaced the Hyena – but both groups will go on thinking they are the salt of the earth – another symbol of the coming fascist regime. The idea proposed here is that long before Mussolini, the Hyenas had been forged already in the transition from aristocracy towards the modern nation-state; the money-grubbing petit-bourgeois mayor, the sun-hardened men behind the protection rackets that would lay the basis for the Sicilian mafia, the love of violence and punishment in the ex-soldiers and new policemen, Tancredi’s own unfeeling careerism – the seeds of Fascism were already visible in all of their little compromises and insincerities.

The TV show extrapolates more on Tancredi’s future; his new wife’s infidelity, and his own flippancy, horrifies his uncle. As they part ways for the last time, Tancredi celebrates being officially sent to Paris as the new ambassador to France; Angelica embraces him with joy, despite having been pimped out to the French ambassador against her will to ensure this promotion. The disturbing scene where she has to stomach her disgust when the short, whiskered man licks her neck is seemingly forgotten, or perhaps not. She has single-handedly navigated the couple’s connection to history, drawing them closer to power – returning to the city where she attended finishing school at the behest of her family, the finishing school which gave her the sensuality and ambition to seduce the nephew of a Prince, allowing her merchant father to shroud his arbitrage in a veil of respectability and history.

A few days ago I had lunch with my girlfriend’s best friend, a girl who got a Master’s degree from Harvard and made six figures doing marketing for the fastest growing EdTech business in the world, the company where the two had met. Now she works as a part-time English tutor. She has married a lovely, chubby man from the Northeast with a series of highly-placed family connections which enabled the dramatic success of his wind-power sustainable energy business. She is full of vitality and charm. Her husband regularly eats with the Provincial Governor of Liaoning. They took a 50,000 USD vacation to Seychelles. The pair is ambitious – they want the good life, they want to leverage their connection to industry, to the salt-of-the-earth politicians and engineers, in order to catapult themselves to immense material surplus. But they seem simultaneously cut off from the milieu of Chinese young people and world-historical youth politics.

Together, the three of us walk slowly through the basement of the new shopping district in Sanlitun, surrounded by the chicest of brands. We walk slowly past a new pop-up selling caviar ice-cream for 20$ a pop. We talk about the nitty-gritty details of in vitro fertilization. We have high-quality Japanese hand-drip coffee.

I can’t help but feel that we are impossibly far from a time when young people could make politics, from Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand. But my anger has been tempered – by an incredible new Chinese animated film, Nobody. In Chinese, the name is 浪浪山小妖怪, Little Monsters of Chillin’ Mountain. It is worth finding, for those of you who can’t see it in theaters, and spoilers follow. The story follows four yaoguai, little, malevolent animal spirits, as they desperately look for secure employment and happiness working for the more powerful warlords and demons who populate this dangerous mountain, most notable for being an important stop on Sun Wukong’s Journey to the West. The sycophantic, pragmatic Frog and daydreaming, naïve Boar spirits initially get jobs scrubbing the ceremonial metal pots that their warlord plans to use to cook the Monkey King’s master, the monk Tang Sanzang, in order to gain immortality. Their stable, State-Owned Enterprise jobs are quickly thrown into disarray, and they realize they’ll have to make their own fortunes as Digital Nomads, eventually hatching a plot, with their new friends, the loquacious, self-obsessed Weasel and cowardly, stuttering Gorilla, to impersonate Wukong and his entourage in order to beg for alms.

The four famous, mighty figures of myth are seen only twice in the movie, once silhouetted against a sunset as they prepare to wipe out a cave of Wolf Demons, and once at the very end of the movie striding past our four little spirits at sunrise, after they’ve committed their act of incredible heroism. And they are incredibly heroic, sacrificing their consciousness and ability to speak in order to save a village of children and, ultimately, assist Wukong on his journey to obtain the Buddhist sutras. At the end of the movie, the four nameless nobodies run off screen before they can share their names with each other, returned to animal form, never to be immortalized in myth, regular workers, abused by their bosses, mocked by the powerful and the brave and by history, consigned to nondescript lives of humiliation which they have nonetheless refused to mar their dignity and their capacity for incredible empathy and moral action.

At one point in the movie, a character laughs at the attempt of the Boar to motivate his compatriots: “This is ridiculous. No matter how hard you try, you couldn’t get close those four. Don’t you know Tang Sanzang is the brother of the Emperor? And Sun Wukong knows the Buddha personally!” The young parents in the theater barked out nervous laughter and then sunk into solemnity.

By the end of the movie, ass-kissing Frog gives up his newly established middle-manager position to literally run to Boar’s side in his time of need, not hesitating for a second to choose the love of his friend over anything else. Weasel discovers that when he stops nervously holding forth, dedication to craft and introspection will deliver immense personal meaning, and Gorilla discovers that he can stomach any embarrassment or fear, as long as it is in service of others. It is a sappy antidote to communism’s love of the H-word. Not all of us can be agents of history, but we can all cultivate subjectivity, inner life that guides external action, in the hope that a team of animators in Shanghai, millennia down the line, can channel our spirits, naughty or not, into art.

Editorial Comments:
The following piece was written by Yu Liang, assistant dean and associate professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies at Fudan University, on August 20th, 2019. It was published on The Observer, an influential privately owned media outlet whose growth has been closely linked to the “Industrial Party” featured in this article. Although the author has a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and a doctorate in literature, he has become a well-regarded political commentator, with a specific focus on the intersection between digital public spheres, internet discourse, new media, and “social governance.” This particular article introduces the concept of the “Industrial Party” and its relevance to a burgeoning consensus among a rising cohort of educated Chinese who seek to reshape public discourse and political life, which they see as dominated by Western liberalism.

The Industrial Party is a term that originated online and that is used in contemporary China to describe a cohort of public commentators who come from industrial or STEM backgrounds and seek to promote their particular interpretation of contemporary life. More than just a simply a group of public intellectuals with shared principles, Yu Liang argues that the Industrial Party represents a novel outgrowth in the consciousness of China’s middle class, a sublimation of Mao-era class politics, the history of the Chinese intellectual vanguard, and China’s unique path to modernization. Yu sees the trend as a spontaneous ideological readjustment among the grassroots, following failures of various socialist experiments in China.

For China Hands, foreign business interests, and those interested in the path forward for the Chinese internet and industry, this article provides a crucial lens into intellectual and public discourse in China about developmentalism, humanism, and the future of the digital public sphere. In America, media kingpins and now tech oligarchs have held increasingly more powerful positions in shaping public discourse, political will, and national priorities. However, it is true that the vast majority of public intellectuals come from the humanistic disciplines. Besides a handful of science-popularizers and niche commentators in fields such as personal finance, AI, entrepreneurship, or health, it is rare to see individuals holding PhDs in STEM fields commenting on issues such as satellite technology, sustainable development, agriculture, or national infrastructure. CEOs hold greater prestige and public attention in this domain than scientists or industrialists. While this could be explained with the argument that, over the previous two decades, America has sought to establish itself as a leader in post-industrial affairs such as global finance, software development, and higher education, the Industrial Party provides a poignant point of comparison between Chinese and American development and public discourse.

In one of Yu Liang’s early examples, he discusses the ability of the Industrial Party to dampen outrage at a high-speed rail accident and redirect positive public opinion back at the dramatic development that this technology has enabled across the country. While this example may appear to outsiders as yet another instance of vertically-instituted consensus, Liang would reply that, as members of a non-political intelligentsia, the Industrial Party’s public footprint actually represents a grassroots outworking of a middle-class consciousness which endorses development as part of a rationally-minded nationalism.

This example also provides a counterargument to those who would say that the Industrial Party represents relations of production that are outmoded for post-industrial, neoliberal, or information-based economies. Not only would it be nice, in America, to have a high-speed rail, it would additionally be a boon to have educated, technical thought-leaders with political clout and a sense of civic responsibility that could orient public discourse around communitarian topics such as infrastructure and uneven development.

Yu ultimately endorses the Industrial Party’s success. He argue that it challenges the entrenchment of capitalistic concepts such as entrepreneurship within China’s middle class and how education reform towards a more liberal arts model draws China down a wrong path. In China, this represents a “Left Wing” perspective, and while this may not map onto a Western political compass, it raises certain paradoxical comparisons with America’s New Right, who sought to champion the worker instead of the small businessman and to criticize the humanities and liberal arts institutions.

Finally, when I read the original piece, certain American public figures came to mind, and I list them here to encourage the reader to begin their own comparisons: CEOs like Jamie Dimon, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel Palantir’s Alex Karp, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, scientists such as Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox, or Neil de Grasse Tyson. How do these figures correspond with the arguments being made below? What do their relative clout and political engagement say about the priorities of American politics, especially in comparison with Chinese? What does this comparison say about the difference in attitude towards industry and the public sphere?

1.Introduction
The words “industry” and “humanity” seem to have little in common with one another. The former is associated with images of heaviness, force, machinery, and pollution, while the latter points to poetry, elegance, emotion, and cultural heritage, two sets of meaning far removed from one another. However, the term Industrial Party, popularized on the Chinese Internet, has emerged in contrast with the Sentimental Party.
The term Industrial Party has appeared before in socialist history. In the 1920s, the Soviet government used the term to refer to groups of engineers and specialists who were arrested for undermining industrialization. In the 1960s, Khrushchev’s USSR set up a joint-party-committee for the industrial sector, which he referred to specifically as his “Industrial Party”. Both were designations assigned by outside forces. Today’s concept of the Industrial Party has a coherent sense of internal identity. It is not directly derived from the Soviet Union, instead originating from more recent events.

While the Western world continues to face down the dilemma of de-industrialization, developing countries still move forward with the 20th century historical proposition of “industrialization,” raising questions of spiritual and intellectual significance for modern people. The Industrial Party is one of these questions. One direct reason for the emergence of the modern Industrial Party in China today is that there is a highly patriotic element of STEM intellectuals who are dissatisfied that the field of public opinion has been controlled by almost exclusively by humanities-based intellectuals. This group believes that their counterparts in the humanities lack scientific or technical foundations in regard to major issues concerning national and social development. This has created a sense of urgency within the group to express their views publicly. They have therefore taken upon themselves the responsibility of public education, especially in the realm of national science and technology development. Riding on the growing influence of internet in shaping public sentiment in China, they have gained entry into the domain of public discourse, from which they were previously isolated.

The 2011 Ningbo-Wenzhou train accident was a major opportunity for the discourse of the Industrial Party to break into the mainstream of public opinion. At that time, the train accident triggered a tsunami of criticism from public commentators towards high-speed rail construction. Mainstream commentators fiercely criticized the “Great Leap Forward” of high-speed rail and the system of state-owned enterprises across various media platforms, using the rallying call of “Wait for your Soul”.

[Editor’s Note: I have preserved this phrase in its literal form. It has been used on the Internet over the course of the past 10 years in the context of criticizing development or progress that comes at the cost of human life. The original Chinese phrase can also be understood as “Don’t Leave your Soul Behind,” or “Don’t Go Forward without Your Soul.”]

However, the newly established Observer opposed this critical tide, not only producing positive high-speed rail news in response, but also inviting a group of technically-minded authors to discuss and support the development of high-speed rail from the perspectives of scientific and policy planning. The detailed content of some of these articles include analyses of the difference between dedicated passenger rail and passenger/cargo rail, the gap between highway safety index and railroad safety index, and the impact of high-speed rail on regional economic development, among others. It was a wide-ranging and in-depth discussion, which opened a new arena of public discourse.

Around the same time, The Big Goal, a book which has been attributed to the members of the Industrial Party was published, popularizing the terminologies and concepts of this group on the Internet and in circles of public opinion. Since then, the Industrial Party has played a role in supporting mainstream public opinion on many major topics related to science, technology, and industry, including the reaction to the trade war between China and the United States.

The distinctive rhetoric of the Industrial Party has attracted a large number of readers who are drawn to its pragmatic stance amid intense international competition. Ma Qianzu (the pen name of Ren Chonghao), who majored in civil engineering, has become one of the top three most-liked celebrities on the question-and-answer website Zhihu; Yuan Lanfeng, who majored in chemical physics, advocates for China’s scientific and technological development through eloquent and data-rich articles, which are edited and published by The Observer and have gained wide influence; Jia Jinjing, who focuses on macroeconomic policy research, has made a mark on China’s think tank community with his industrial analysis capabilities. Chen Jing, who majored in computer science, has been attracted renewed attention to the field of economics for his successful prediction about economic trends more than a decade ago; Ning Nanshan, who majored in manufacturing engineering, discusses the Western and Chinese industries on by posting on his personal WeChat public number, which continually receives readership above the 100,000 mark; Chen Ping, Lu Feng, and Wen Yi, who emphasize industrial innovation, are not the main focus of China’s think tank community; Chen Ping, Lu Feng, Wen Yi and other non-mainstream economists who emphasize industrial innovation have also attracted enthusiastic attention; and a group of Industrial Party netizens have collaborated to produce the time-travel novel “Lingao Venus”, which describes the process of rebuilding the modern industrial system and has gained a level of influence in the field of online novels; Liu Cixin, the world-renowned science fiction writer, is also regarded as having Industrial Party ideas.

2.The Subjectivity of Industrial Culture

There is no lack of discussion on the issue of industrialization in China, but the concept of Industrial Party is dominated by the subjective character of the issue of what a “new person” should look like today. [The original phrase is included within quotation marks, and literally translates as “What kind of new person to be.” This is related to the political/sociological concept of the social evolution of humankind into different “species”, such as Homo Economicus etc., as will become clear later.] We can easily observe that almost any disciplinary discussion involves a discussion of new personalities, such as Western economics emphasizing the so-called “Homo Economicus” and jurisprudence emphasizing the “Legalis Homo,” not to mention the popularity of the idea that literature is the study of man. The STEM disciplines originally had the concept of “Homo Scientificus”, but discussions of industry often have nothing to do with personality.

In the “Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Development of Industrial Culture” issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the Ministry of Finance (MOF) in January 2017, where several statements concerning personality appear: “Promoting the spirit of craftsmanship,” “Cultivating entrepreneurial spirit,” and ” Strengthening the cultivation of industrial workers’ professionalism.”

“Entrepreneurship” emerged in the era of the market economy, but its description was limited to the upper echelons of enterprise, with a focus on wealth and management. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the proletariat became seen as the dominating force behind the country, shaping workers’ sense of ownership and offering a non-elite perspective. This sentiment has weakened after the reform and opening-up.

The Industrial Party offers “key personnel at the rank-and-file level” a progressive way of thinking that links the modern concept of ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ with industrial culture, in response to the historical frustration of Chinese workers over their failure to take center stage in a socialist country. While industrial culture serves as the foundation of the Industrial Party’s advocacy, the new consciousness it has fostered transcends the realm of industry, offering a broader framework for understanding history and the world.

Few members of the group which oppose or define themselves in opposition to the Industrial Party would refer to themselves as the Sentiment Party, but there are many self-referential synonyms for this group in circulation, such as “Little Fresh”, “Little and Certainly Happy” , and even the identity category of “Poet”, which was popularized throughout the 1980s.

[Editor’s Note: These phrases are self-referential identity labels, and fall into the rubric of the Chinese diminutive which uses “Little” as a term of endearment, intimacy, or affection. “Little Fresh,” for instance, or “Poet” for that matter, would be used by commentators who are trying to identify themselves with an explicitly literary and “humanist” worldview.]

The contradiction between the contemporary Industrial Party and the Sentimental Party can be illustrated by a simple news story: a white-collar worker in Shanghai, grown tired of bland city life, wants to escape to a secluded paradise with “no need for any modern facilities, only water, electricity and internet connection”. However, behind water, electricity, and Internet is the entirety of industrial system, difficult to completely conceal but nonetheless eliminated from the symbolic system of sentiments. As one side of the middle-class, the Industrial Party consciousness has to compete with its opposite member – petty-bourgeois consciousness – for the right to speak, elevating itself to a kind of sentiment (e.g., Ma Ping writes that “Industry is the most romantic thing under the sky! “, in order to call for a return to previously obscured values.
Marx offers an architectural metaphor to describe the relationship between the mode of production and ideology, the familiar “base/superstructure” metaphor. The superstructure reflects the economic base, but can often be a mode of false or inverted consciousness which serves to preserve and conceal the inherent contradictions of the mode of production. The most important quality of the Industrial Party method of thinking is its ability to dismantle the partition between superstructure and base, to see a technological base from the perspective of ideological superstructure, embedding technical knowledge and experience, which are based in praxis but difficult to visualize, onto the “cultivation” of thinking.

3.The Expansion of Modern Sentiment
It is very important that the word “sentiment” be clearly stated and understood. Some members of the Industrial Party believe that the ‘sentimental’ culture of nostalgia comes from the agricultural mode of production, but they neglect to realize that this is also the result of the complex operation of modern capitalism, which is embedded in modern life and is far from being an “agrarian social sentiment”.
Modernity is a concept with origins in the West, and therefore so is modern sentiment. The Chinese term “情怀” has no proper English counterpart, and refers to both feeling and ideal meanings. It is an intertwining of emotions, ideals, obsessions, and aestheticized subjectivity, and generally refers to the “Idealist” orientation that the “mind” that transcends the dimensions of material reality. The most important connotation lies in its attachment to socially constructed concepts, as reflected in expressions such as familial loyalty, patriotism and class consciousness.
Industrialization is seen as one of the fundamental features of modernity (13), which cannot be separated from the soil of modern thought. The Enlightenment placed man, not God, at the center of the world, and epistemologically rejected the logic of theological thinking, which was based on deduction from a priori truths, basic phenomena, and the establishment of fact, all of which paved the way for scientific research and industrial production.

Photos from:

https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2013/08/photo-essay-wuhai-city-coal-complex-shows-costs-chinas-energy-demands/

https://madeinchinajournal.com/2018/10/18/visualising-labour-and-labourscapes-in-china/

My first stop was Universal Studios, which allows me to clarify my use of the word ‘YUUP-ie,’ normally short for young, upwardly-mobile urban professional. In this mirror world, the first ‘U’ can be familiarly understood as “Urban.” The second ‘U’ however, has to be removed completely; if there was a way for Chinese young people to move beyond the coal mine or cardboard factory wealth of their parents, it is certainly not through employment in a debilitatingly expensive metropole. The ‘P’ is split between real professionals and those who are simply puttering away their parents’ money, the Wealthy Second Generation that dominates these consumption centers.

1

At Universal Studios, filling the interchanges between SoCal-themed store decorations designed to invoke a nostalgic early 2010s, beach bum, Pilates-princess California vibe, complete with a fake Ralph’s grocery store, throng thousands of wealthy young couples between the ages of 19 and 29. Most of time both of them wear purple make-up, or Canada Goose jackets, or Balenciaga shoes.

It is crazy busy, and filled with some of the clearest declarations of love you’ll see anywhere. Maybe 20,000 boyfriends don Minion backpacks, Harry Potter robes, How to Tame Your Dragon hats, and Kung Fu panda glasses. These outfits are stand-ins for a crystalline adoration of one’s partner - the amount of effort spent on make-up and cosplay and photography demonstrable proof of commitment.

These kids should probably be classified as comfortable, and I wonder if they are students skipping class or just wealthy enough not to have to work normal hours. I wonder why taking hundreds of photos in cosplay is what they’ve decided to be a worthwhile usage of the leisure time that their parents won through bloody triumph over the 90s and 00s in the Chinese private or public spheres. I wonder if they are secretly securing their families future financial security through expedient marriages. I wondered many things, but mostly I had a lovely date with my own partner who does not need more than one round of goofy photos in front of a chubby baby Kung Fu Panda.

2

My next stop is called 1733. It is Beijing’s newest mall, consisting not of a complex that has sprouted upwards but instead a sunken moat that has been dug around the headquarters of TenCent Beijing. I went there one afternoon on my own for a head massage after my classes finish but before I had to head back to campus to supervise some of my students’ basketball competition.

Upon descending an escalator into sublevel 1, I was confronted by a 20-foot blue dragon, snarling towards the heavens. Behind it was a jumbotron, proudly displaying the assembly of said dragon. Something about seeing it deconstructed into steel and plastic felt slightly perverse. I looked back at the dragon, who this time looked embarrassed. There is some metaphor here for being too obsessed with aggrandizing the process of construction, of 100 generations on the road to communism, that you pull back the curtain too early, robbing the final product of its magic. We don’t want to see under the surface, underneath the tech giants which prop up the Chinese consumer economy. Just show us the dragon.

After dashing out of this dangerous environ, I ended up in a café with on sublevel 2, no windows to speak of, on a bean bag next to Beach Boys records. It was a 60s themed music venue at night, but the only people inside during the day were a trio of hipster 30-somethings with tattoos, big bellies, and graphic tees talking about digital marketing tactics and recent business trends. Who else would want to spend an afternoon underneath TenCent.

3

Finally I spent an afternoon in a community called “The Upper East Side.” The kaleidoscope world continues to twist – this UES was home to an Italian and a French bistro and a dinosaur themed café. I picked up my girlfriend from her private pilates appointment and we went to have café corretos on the 4th floor of this housing complex, passing an unbelievable suite of luxury cars on the way in.

Seated next to us was a woman in a wheelchair. Across from her was another woman in a suit, showing the first a series of B movie clips with Eastern European actors. She explained her role in the filming, spoke about the marketing process, answered questions about lighting decisions. At the end she asked for money for her next production. The wheelchair lady regaled her mysteriously from across the ciabattas.

I got pretty drunk on grappa and we walked out to find our way home. The Upper East Side is a light-grey and dark-grey amalgamation of smooth cement. Each window pane is alternately withdrawn or pushed out beyond the façade of the building, creating a kind of lego effect once extrapolated to the 30 floor. There are exposed staircases on the inside perimeter of a large courtyard space formed inside the building complex, somewhat reminiscent of the Barbican without the jagged concrete. Up to the 3rd floor are shop fronts – piano tutoring, dance, real estate, all the needs of the young and wealthy. It looks more prison-chic than bougie, but I guess that feeling of security is what the residents are paying for. The apartments here sell in the 2-5 million dollar range.

4

And right when I think the kaleidoscope has become too much, too disorienting and upsetting to continue, I go for a walk under the skyscrapers of China World, the most affluent district in the city, home to two of the top five malls in the world by revenue, at sunset. It is 5:53pm, and I turn the corner to the subway station.

The 108-story China Zun Citic building sparkles dramatically like a huge flower vase, its upper stories curving delicately outward like the Song Dynasty wine vessel it is named after. On the sidewalk, chuckling lightly, are six construction workers, off work and heading back to the bus stations which will take them to their dorms or out of the city. Momentarily they are resplendent in the twinkling reflection, a dazzle of colors over calloused hands. They each hold a plastic bag with a chicken wing and some rice.

The city is grounded. We are not floating upwards into a cloud world of untethered, derivative consumption and emulated isolation. The things around us are made, by human hands, by materials that hold and dissipate warmth.

The city is still a zone of opportunity, where human effort can bring the new into existence, and where lives can be sustained with dignity and equitable remuneration. Where things have insides as well as outsides.