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Aesthetics of Translocality and Crossmediality in Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves

Zhang Yingjin   

  1. the Department of Literature at University of California, San Diego, USA
  • Online:2017-11-25 Published:2017-10-18
  • About author:Zhang Yingjin is Visiting Chair Professor, School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, Chair of the Department of Literature at University of California, San Diego, USA. His research covers literature, film, urban culture and cultural history. His publications include fourteen English books, eleven Chinese books, and over 170 research articles in Chinese, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean.

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Abstract: This article examines translocality and crossmediality as new developments in cinema and visual studies. Isaac Julien's 9-screen video installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010) represents a migratory aesthetics based on translocal evocation, crossmedial interaction, and mobile spectatorship. As Julien reconstructs the legend of Mazu and memories of Shanghai in radically different modes (e. g., the idyllic versus the phantasmagoric, the nostalgic versus the post-nostalgic), their screen images and sounds enter a constant circulation and produce intriguing multi-directional, multi-spatial, and multi-temporal dissonance/resonances across different media and genres — cinema, art photography, video installation, police rescue footage, calligraphy, poetry, painting, and star performance. Cross-border visual arts no doubt have enhanced the auteur mystique, but a key question remains as to whether Western audience, in its reception of Eastern imageries, could break through the confines of entrenched Orientalism.

Key words: translocal practice, crossmedia aesthetics, Isaac Julien, Ten Thousand Waves (2010) , memories of Shanghai, mobile spectatorship, migratory aesthetics