Trinh T. Minh-ha: What About China?
Trinh T. Minh-ha, What About China?, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Women Make Movies
Winner, New:Vision Award, CPH:DOX 2022
Winner, Prix Bartók, Jean Rouch International Film Festival 2022
2022 Whitney Biennial
In the visually and sonically stunning What About China?, renowned artist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha revisits Hi8 video footage she shot in rural China in the 1990s to explore the country’s complex and evolving narratives about itself. She draws on Chinese concepts of harmony to guide the project, tracing examples across time, from the round architecture of communal Hakka houses to the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to reshape rural and urban populations. Weaving these ideas together with poetry, folk songs, testimony, and ritual, Trinh offers a rich and polyphonic reflection on the shifting relations between self, community, and state.
Co-presented by SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program and Conversations at the Edge. Additional support provided by the Penny Stamps Speaker Series at the University of Michigan.
2022, China
Format: Digital
In English and Mandarin with English subtitles
135 minutes followed by a conversation with the artist
RELATED EVENTS
Tuesday, March 25, 6:00 p.m.
Trinh T. Minh-ha Artist Lecture
The Art Institute of Chicago, Fullerton Hall, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Tuesday, May 6, 6:00 p.m.
Forgetting Vietnam
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Trinh T. Minh-ha is a world-renowned filmmaker, writer, composer, and distinguished professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Her practice has been honored in 69 retrospectives around the world. Trinh’s body of work includes nine feature-length films: What About China? (2021); Forgetting Vietnam (2016); Night Passage (2004); The Fourth Dimension (2001); A Tale of Love (1996); Shoot for the Contents (1991); Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989); Naked Spaces (1985); and Reassemblage (1982). Several large-scale multimedia installations include In Transit (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020); L’Autre marche (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris 2006–2009); Old Land New Waters (3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China 2008, Okinawa Museum of Fine Arts 2007); and The Desert is Watching (Kyoto Biennial, 2003). Numerous publications include Lovecidal: Walking with The Disappeared (2016); D-Passage: The Digital Way (2013); Elsewhere, Within Here (2011), Cinema Interval (1999); and Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989).
Her many awards include the 2014 Wild Dreamer Lifetime Achievement Award at the Subversive Film Festival, Zagreb; the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from Women's Caucus for Art; the 2012 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association; the 2006 Trailblazers Award at MIPDoc in Cannes, France; and the 1991 AFI National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award.
Her latest film, What About China?, has received the 2022 New:Vision Award at CPH:DOX Film Festival in Copenhagen; The 2022 Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival; the Prix Bartók at the 2022 Jean Rouch Film Festival; the Inspiration Award at Viet Film Fest; a Special Commendation at the BFI London Film Festival; and the Presidential Award at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Film Festival.
ACCESSIBILITY
Conversations at the Edge events have live captions (CART). The Gene Siskel Film Center is fully ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu
TICKETS
$13 General public
$8 Students & seniors
$6.50 Film Center members
$5 SAIC staff & faculty & AIC staff
FREE for SAIC students with a valid ID
All CATE programs are free for SAIC students. Unless otherwise noted, SAIC student tickets are released five days prior to showtime. Tickets must be picked up in person from the Gene Siskel Film Center box office. A student ID is required.
RESOURCE GUIDES
Conversations at the Edge’s resource guides contain articles, interviews, and other material related to upcoming artists and events. Available here.