WHAT ABOUT CHINA?

Director Trinh T. Minh-ha will be in attendance for the screening and Q&A, moderated by writer, translator, and curator Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng.

Drawing from footage shot mostly in 1993–1994 in villages of Eastern and Southern China linked in common lore to the remote origins of China’s civilizations, the film takes the notion of harmony in China as a site of creative manifestation. Highly valued as a virtue and a guiding criterion in ethics, harmony has played an important role in the lives of Chinese people since ancient times. It encompasses the fundamental principles of nature, society and humanity, summing up three main relations: harmony with society; harmony with nature; and harmony with oneself.

In the film, “harmony” involves not only the way music fundamentally defines reality, or the way space takes shape and structures daily life, but also the dynamic agents in the ongoing process of safeguarding the “roundness” of a world of social equity. Offering a journey into the wealth of China’s traditional architecture while exploring the hinterlands of self and other in their encounter, the film addresses the process of “harmonising” rural China, due to the country’s Great Uprooting. It seeks to engage the viewer further by asking: What exactly is disappearing? And how?