IKEBANA will be playing in a retrospective of
@lilyjshhh films: WORK AND PLACE IN THE WORKPLACE: THE FILMS OF LILY JUE SHENG at
@anthologyfilmarchives on June 6th at 7:30.
I am looking forward to observing Lily’s poetic work in conversation with moderator Steff Hui Ci Ling.
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The moving-image works of Lily Jue Sheng are distinguished by their richly multi-layered quality (visually, thematically, and conceptually), and by their achievement in creating a sensory-driven cinema that’s as piercing as it is poetic, imaginative, and strange. Whether working with experimental animation, collage, documentary, text, or some combination thereof, Sheng’s films devise polyphonic compositions that link the totality of their ideas to the unassuming, common spaces they frequent day-to-day. Their earlier films coincided with a temporary job cataloging the works of Japanese filmmaker Stom Sogo, which not only informs their cinematic and occupational habits of rephotographing images to the punctuated beat of a hair-raising soundtrack, but also renders categorically illegible, thereby neglected, the kind of work performed by filmmakers doubling as cinema’s conditionally documented and perpetually alien technical workers. In their later films, Sheng starts to more explicitly circumvent, recontextualize, and unravel the symbolic tensions permeating language, specifically focusing on deteriorated or vernacular inflections of Chinese. In these works, written characters function simultaneously as the primary image, text caption, oral tradition, and somatic drawing of their personal lineage toward a more critical consciousness, bearing the spirit of Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s rigorously reframed subtitles and anthropological studies.
