Film Studies

Positioned itself in the stance of critical posthumanism, this essay examines the virtual corporeality in Markus Selg and Susanne Kennedy's VR performance I AM (VR). By introducing Zhuangzi's idea of Tenuous self (虛我) and Jean-Luc Nancy's take on the liminal body, this essay asks how do we consider the physical form of the body, assembled in reality-reality within the immersive sharing and exchanging process of virtual-reality? What kind of transformation that the body might experience when it immerses into that otherworldly reality? I Am (VR), as an embodied performative happening of both artistic research and practice of virtual reality, provides insightful perspective in searching for possible answers. Taking this analysis as a departure point, this essay further investigates the possible entanglements between the ‘I’ and the ‘VR'.

Deeply rooted in ancient Chinese wisdom, Wan-wu(萬物), translated as “myriad happenings” or “ten thousand things”, is a way of experiencing the world. Linguistically, “Wan” means ten thousand, and “Wu” indicates objects, things, happenings, phenomena, among others. From a Daoist perspective, “wan-wu” does not simply limit itself within the quantitive account of objects and things. The figure of “Ten thousand” rather refers to “manifold”, “particular”, “manifest”, “emergent”, and even a bit “miscellaneous.”1 Such ambiguity and in-between-ness, often flowing in traditional Chinese language, give space to wan-wu’s interpretation and place it as an open sphere which encompasses every single existence that vibrates in (and in
between) the cosmos. Within this context, if the human creatures are but one of these ten thousand things, or even if each human is only one of a myriad of always emergent objects, things, or phenomena, there are new possibilities of entanglements which enable us, the modern human creatures, to re-consider our relationships with, and among non-human creatures, and to further imagine new ways of living and relating to the one and many vast, unbounded, infinite worlds of wanwu.
In this light, this essay attempts to create a pataphysics of Ars for Nons from the perspective of Wan-Wu. Starting with the simple question of What is Ars for Nons to possible imaginations of what Ars for Nons could be, this essay questions about who is enacting the “Ars” for whom? And what could be considered as the “Nons”? It argues that nonhuman entities shall not be overly romanticised, just like nature shall not be overly romanticised, just like the ‘global south’ shall not be overly romanticised. Because in either ways, such romanticisation out of guilt (be it innocent or not) might ultimately lead to the danger of re-producing and re-enforcing anthropocentrism. Instead, drawing from the practice of wan-wu, this essay suggests that perhaps what we need is simply a certain embodied care and awareness towards the existence of “ten thousand things”, the “myriad happenings”. It proposes a process of unlearning about what one might believe one knows; a process of decomposing the dominate hegemonic anthropocentric understanding of the so called “nature”, “animal”, “technology”...a process of cultivating sensibilities towards our mutual shared differences (from gender, racial, physical differences to species differences, technological differences, material differences...). In this way, this essay argues that Ars for Nons might be a path way, a tunnel, an in-between space that channels the moment where we, the modern human creatures involved in various global catastrophes due to our own ignorance, are standing right now to pulsate futures where live many entangled worlds, the worlds of ten thousand things, the worlds of myriad happenings, the worlds of Wan-wu.

* Based on my own practice of wan-wu and interspecies communication, this essay might also propose some exercises for the readers to practice, as an experiment of a piece of “embodied writing”.

As China undergoes its digital revolution with the rapid developments of new media and technology on a massive scale, the bodies which used to be the sites for acclaiming for socio-political demands are now shifted to the digital sphere. However, social activists have discovered alternative ways to raise their voices through the virtual and cyber space. They have interwoven a hybrid body of solidarity in games and digital platforms.

This article takes the 2020 Hong Kong resistance in Nintendo game Animal Crossing and the legacy of Covid-19 ‘Whistle blower’ Li Wenliang on Chinese social media as cases, aiming to develop a comprehensive and comparative analysis on the performativity and solidarity that emerge with gamification and playfulness in contemporary Sino-sphere.

When confronting our post-pandemic human condition, that is, struggling to survive and to create in the capitalist ruins of wars, climate catastrophes, and the sixth extinction of species,[iv] the artist further announces, "Art history needs to be rewritten; modern ways of artistic creation need to be overturned, museums need to be reconstructed."[v] Zheng's statement directs a "callto-action" for recognizing and embodying "morethan-human"[vi] entanglements within the system of art creation, production, and exhibition. More-thanhuman not only refers to the expansive terrain of species and matters such as plants, animals, geological substances, memories, spirits… where humans do not dominate but are part of the assemblage of beings. It proposes a form of worldly engagement that is material, elemental, and inherently toward the process of deanthropocentrism. In this light, we may regard "morethan-human" as one of the interpretations of "wanwu 萬物," the Daoist notion of the myriad happenings. Zheng's calling for wanwu space thus acquires a radical departure from the conventional understanding of museum-according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, a building or a part of a building set aside as a repository and display place for objects relating to art, literature, or science[vii]toward a space that hosts different temporalities and cultivates the liveliness of (not-just-human-)beings. This is not to assume that art museums nowadays are standardized, monolithic organisations. Yet, no matter what kind of aesthetic concepts or social functions they are subjected to, be it Pompidou Metz, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Rockbound Museum of Art in Shanghai, or MALBA in Buenos Aires, all these museums are, more or less, structured as anthropocentric institutions that celebrate man-made aesthetic narratives prioritizing "ways of seeing."[viii] In Radical Museology, when considering the global panorama of contemporary art museums,

Corporations create images and avatars which work to bolster an idea in the public consciousness that they have personal identities which are knowable, likeable, even folksy. We all know and understand the meaning or character of 'Mickey Mouse', 'Colonel Sanders', or 'Ronald McDonald'. These images are as familiar to us as any image can be. Yet most of us could not say how this happened, or when. Henrietta Ashworth places this odd sleight of hand alongside a history of the corporation and American identity while also examining how images such as these are used, both subversively and otherwise, in visual culture, and the extent to which it is possible to oppose or subvert the corporate agenda by means of film, either narrative or documentary. In so doing, 'Looking Outside The Castle' examines the ways in which visual culture is informed, interpellated and unavoidably influenced by the narratives that large corporations write for themselves, and asks &#...

Johnnie To's romantic comedies Don't Go Breaking My Heart (hereafter DGBMH) 1 (2011) and 2 (2014), the first of which is set around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, use volatile stock exchanges as the backgrounds for their triangular and pentagonal love stories, respectively. 1 This setting links the dynamics of romance to the ultracapitalistic environment of Hong Kong, in which the logic of financialization extends to all aspects of life, including love and coupling. This chapter analyses the two DGBMH films to rethink the romantic comedy as a genre that interrogates the ethics of capitalism by considering the way the diptych's film style and narrative choices explicate the entanglement between the overwhelmingly consumerist and market-driven mindset of the characters with their approaches to romance and love. While on the surface both films appear to celebrate the capitalist status quo, their inflection of the romantic comedy genre implies a potentially irresolvable conflict between romantic coupling and the capitalist ethos of acquisition and production of an economic surplus. The ideological underpinnings of the romantic comedy continually change in response to transformations in the social, cultural, and economic contexts of love and intimacy. Robin Wood describes the key to the success of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers romantic musical comedies, mostly made in the 1930s, as follows: "What we love about Astaire and Rogers is that they convince us momentarily that the ideal romantic love our culture programs us to believe in can, against all common sense, be realized. " 2 This essentially maps out the contours of the romantic comedy genre as a whole-the desire of two people to fall in love and form a lasting relationship