STRATIGRAPHICAL IMAGES

Yang Beichen on Wang Tuo’s The Interrogation (2017)

Yang Beichen on ghostly technologies, and the obscure layering of images, stories, and identities in Wang Tuo’s work The Interrogation (2017).

Wang Tuo, The Interrogation (审问), 2017. Video still. Single channel HD video, 18’35”. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

Ghosts present themselves often in Wang Tuo’s moving-image works. One thing particularly interesting about these ghosts is they all tend to be archive related or make their appearances when certain archives are “performed” by the artist. The stories and narratives hardly get to be recorded properly or even communicated and delivered at all—the individual memories betraying ambiguous moments, the social events with sensitive implications, and the history of China in its times of opacity and obscurity—all of these are “archived” again by the artist, and then stored in the narrative veins he intricately constructs. In engaging with archives through these performative acts we come to see that these ghosts are far from reticent, rather, they are fully active—agitated and restless since endowed with mediated bodies. As these haunting specters are now vested with forms, the existing narration is destabilized, as if tossed into a perpetual state of oscillations which result from an endless series of fluctuations, (re)formations, and subversions. It seems as though we’ve come across ghost-possessed stratigraphical images of this sort¹ in the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, as well as in Marguerite Duras’s work, yet what Wang provides here is a variant that’s rich in indescribable memories and emotions. The artist manifests these obscure, shadowy figures—often either neglected or sunk into oblivion—and, through the deployment of certain traditions in Chinese philosophy and historiography,² he integrates these experiences, thus giving them visibility and narratability anew.

MODERN TECHNOLOGIES LIKE PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM ARE CONSIDERED INHERENTLY TIED TO ARCHIVAL GHOSTS. AS JACQUES DERRIDA ONCE POINTED OUT, THEIR TECHNICITY SEEMS TO BE PRECISELY THE SITE ON WHICH SPECTRALITY ARISES.

The Interrogation (2017) is a video constructed from still images. Modern technologies like photography and film are considered inherently tied to archival ghosts. As Jacques Derrida once pointed out, their technicity seems to be precisely the site on which spectrality arises.³ In Wang’s film we see dissolving shots recurring time and again, in which one photo slowly fades into another—one is in the process of disappearing, with the other one gradually appearing—resulting in superimpositions that generate transient interruptions and suspensions. Meanwhile, time is not necessarily destroyed here, it instead appears to be quivering and blinking, hence further stirring up ripples and vortices.

Wang Tuo, The Interrogation (审问), 2017. Video still. Single channel HD video, 18’35”. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

This may easily remind one of La jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), yet it strikes me as being actually more reminiscent of another lesser-known masterpiece Colloque de chiens (1977), in which director Raúl Ruiz manages to build within his film through the use of montage a singular “community with shared destiny,” so to speak. Trapped as if in karmic loops, various characters turn out as destined to have the same fate, or in fact may all be one and the same person. Wang’s The Interrogation is different in that it is a “ghost story,” in which the characters transform, morph, and switch into one another. Here, more than one destiny is present, as the artist establishes symmetrical narrative veins and the plot unfolds in two space-times: on the one side are two male characters, and on the other two women; a job interview takes place on one side, the other side stages psychotherapy sessions; communication with the supposed other is the main concern for the one side, while the other side is involved in expressions of the self; on the one side the faces persist, while the other is totally devoid of them. The two veins entangle and rub against each other, so much so that whenever the voice-over on one side “wrongly” slides into the other side, or else, once a line such as “she was like a formatted hard disk” is displayed, it dawns on the viewer that each character may potentially refer to or serve as a stand-in for the others. These moments of revelation may incur further confusion in the viewer, not knowing anymore who the “she” in the dropped line actually refers to; engulfed by the ripples and vortices of images, the “self” thus finds itself slipping into a game of endless projection, mapping, and identification.

The artist’s inspiration for the work comes from a conversation he once had with a local officer from the Commission for Discipline Inspection in his hometown. The officer disclosed to him the techniques and skills he employs in interviews and interrogations. The details of this discussion interests Wang greatly, as he sees underneath this specifically local experience a certain game at play, with stakes that are largely humane and universal. The interrogated becomes the interrogator, as the man turns into the “ghost,” and the soul in its turn seems to have accomplished its cycle of transference and regeneration. Staring at the extreme close-ups and unconventional framings in The Interrogation and encountering faces that are squeezed, crimpled, curled up, cut, and deformed, we come to grasp that what the artist is presenting is a hauntology that’s simultaneously indigenous and cosmopolitan.

Wang Tuo, The Interrogation (审问), 2017. Video still. Single channel HD video, 18’35”. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

This comprehension facilitates our understanding of the intersection between The Interrogation and Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), and how it comes into play. Persona can be seen as an archive of faces/ghosts constructed by Bergman, a devotee of the study of the soul. In Bergman’s cinematic world, faces, more often than not, are related to doubles and doublings, or shadows and shade. Their appearance on-screen implies both presence and absence, and represents life as well as death. This is precisely what makes the faces in Bergman’s film so disturbing—they are not simple externalizations of the inner worlds of men and women but are rather self-portraits that symbolize the disintegration of the subject and the duality within all of us. They are our other “selves” out in the world, a realization that is disturbing and unsettling. Bergman’s faces—like those in Wang’s film—of the interrogator and the actors become interchangeable with those of the interrogated and the audience and hover perpetually between states of disjunction and unity. It is nonetheless crucial to point out that in The Interrogation Wang does not gesture toward any Bergmanesque religious metaphysics, nor is he simply resorting to existing critical positions of any kind—none of the dialectics of identity politics are present. He aspires instead to deal with reality, which is ever more chaotic and viscous, in an attempt to locate its possible essence. Wang believes that our secular and emotional life retains certain things that will always exceed the laws and orders of dominant rational discourse. In the hope of ever having these addressed and accounted for, we are first obliged to liberate subjects that have been suppressed by grand narratives and theories for too long and reinvent a narratology that’s micro and intimate. For Wang, whether it is the deployment of faces in The Interrogation or the shamanic medium in the ongoing The Northeast Tetralogy,⁴ they are eventually “mediations which affect how we look at the past, present and future in the here and now”⁵—archival ghosts that are very much alive and performing.

— Translated from Chinese by Xu Ruiyu