Date: Saturday, 3rd December Time: 7:00 – 8:30 PM Location: Bloomsbury Gallery, 34 Bloomsbury St, London WC1B 3QJ Bloomsbury Gallery is pleased to host a special screening of two documentary films in collaboration with Chinese Visual Festival on Saturday, 3rd December. Xiaowen Zhu’s Oriental Silk explore the family legacy behind the first Chinese American silk importer in Los Angeles. Sally Ingleton's Mao’s New Suit tracks Sun Jian and Guo Peis' early career before the latter one became China’s top haute couture designer. Both directed by female filmmakers, these two films examine how fashion is interwoven with Chinese people’s cultural identity in the contemporary society. The screening wil
Presenting: Zhu Xiaowen, Oriental Silk, Documentary film, 2015, 29’32” Arthub previously collaborated with Zhu Xiaowen in 2015 for the Chinese premiere of Oriental Silk at Aurora Museum in Shanghai. Later that year, Zhu’s work was showcased on Arthub’s online Screening Program. The presentation of the three-channel video Distance Between, questioned notions of experimental documentary as a tool for traversing the boundaries of video art, documentary and all that lies between. In her 2012 work, the artist began to explore issues of estrangement, homeland and migration—themes further investigated in Oriental Silk. The documentary launches concurrently with Exhibition on the Table, an IRL pr
When it comes to acts of witness, to testimonials of experience – lived, felt, shared or private – we tend to think first that these statements of heightened being are exactly that, dispatches snatched from the frontline (or thereabouts) of a crisis, histories oral or otherwise that have made it over the border to safety (the border, of course, might be geographical but could equally well be temporal, social, political, generational or defined around gender, belief, race and other tenets of identity: it can sometimes be as hard to survive a family as a war). What makes Oriental Silk both poignant and useful is not only that it provides undeniably rewarding witness and testimony (as well as i