Kiki Tianqi Yu
Dr Kiki Tianqi Yu is a writer, filmmaker, and curator.
www.kikitianqiyu.com
Through cinema and film practice, Kiki's research explores decoloniality, identity formation, aesthetics, and eastern philosophies. She mainly works on three strands of cinema: 1. documentary theory, practice, essayistic nonfiction, and personal cinema; 2. Daoism and film aesthetics, ethics and ontology, 3. women's cinema. She is the author of ‘My’ Self On Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in 21st century China (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), co-editor of China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century (2014), editor and co-translator of the Chinese version of the Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (Laura Rascaroli), China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (by Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar). Her articles also appear at Screen, Studies in Documentary Film, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art, etc.
As a filmmaker, her work include feature documentary China’s Van Goghs (2016), Photographing Shenzhen (2007, Discovery), Memory of Home (2009, collected by DSLCollection). She is the producer and co-director of the award-winning documentary China’s Van Goghs (2016) www.chinasvangoghs.com, world premiered at IDFA 2016, shown at Helsinki Documentary Film Festival DocPoint 2017, Beijing International Film Festival 2017( received Best Feature Documentary award), Thessaloniki Film Festival 2017, Moscow International Film Festival 2018(received Netpac Award), UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, entered the competition at the 48th Vision Du Reel, and TRT Documentary Awards.
As a curator, Kiki curated “Polyphonic China” - the first UK screening of Chinese independent documentary series at Regent Cinema London in 2008-2009, “New Generation Chinese Film” at Celiphlia West London in 2010, and Memory Talks - series of personal documentaries in Shanghai 2017.
Kiki regularly writes column articles for a wider readership. She set up DocLab when she was associate professor in Cinema and Screen Studies at USC-SJTU Institute of Cultural and Creative Industries based in Shanghai.
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sllf/film-studies/people/academic/profiles/yu.html
www.kikitianqiyu.com
Through cinema and film practice, Kiki's research explores decoloniality, identity formation, aesthetics, and eastern philosophies. She mainly works on three strands of cinema: 1. documentary theory, practice, essayistic nonfiction, and personal cinema; 2. Daoism and film aesthetics, ethics and ontology, 3. women's cinema. She is the author of ‘My’ Self On Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in 21st century China (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), co-editor of China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century (2014), editor and co-translator of the Chinese version of the Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (Laura Rascaroli), China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (by Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar). Her articles also appear at Screen, Studies in Documentary Film, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art, etc.
As a filmmaker, her work include feature documentary China’s Van Goghs (2016), Photographing Shenzhen (2007, Discovery), Memory of Home (2009, collected by DSLCollection). She is the producer and co-director of the award-winning documentary China’s Van Goghs (2016) www.chinasvangoghs.com, world premiered at IDFA 2016, shown at Helsinki Documentary Film Festival DocPoint 2017, Beijing International Film Festival 2017( received Best Feature Documentary award), Thessaloniki Film Festival 2017, Moscow International Film Festival 2018(received Netpac Award), UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, entered the competition at the 48th Vision Du Reel, and TRT Documentary Awards.
As a curator, Kiki curated “Polyphonic China” - the first UK screening of Chinese independent documentary series at Regent Cinema London in 2008-2009, “New Generation Chinese Film” at Celiphlia West London in 2010, and Memory Talks - series of personal documentaries in Shanghai 2017.
Kiki regularly writes column articles for a wider readership. She set up DocLab when she was associate professor in Cinema and Screen Studies at USC-SJTU Institute of Cultural and Creative Industries based in Shanghai.
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sllf/film-studies/people/academic/profiles/yu.html
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (42)
Uploads
Books by Kiki Tianqi Yu
Papers by Kiki Tianqi Yu
In April 2017, I conducted two conversations with Wen Hui about her practice, in Shanghai. The first was an interview in a street café near Shanghai Theatre Academy, the second was a public conversation in the form of a Q + A, held after the screening of her Dancing with Third Grandma as part of ‘Memory Talks’ – a series of screenings of personal nonfiction films I curated as a DocLab event. What follows is an edited and condensed version of these two conversations, organized according to theme.
The conversations with Wen Hui began with Wen introducing how she started first person expression through body performance in documentary theatre, using a technique that she calls ‘bodily memory’; her collaborations with Wu Weuguang; then Wen reveals the context of making these two films with a female family member who she refers as her ‘third grandma’. We also discussed how she uses the body to interact with materials, and how filming further enables new avenues of communication. In the last part, she discusses the similarities of these two different documentary mediums, live performance and film. Wen comments on how she sees editing as a kind of choreography, and choreography as editing, her approach of having performers perform their own stories in a collaborative method of co-creation.
‘Image writing’, a concept similar to caméra-stylo that advocated by Alexandre Astruc in his influential article ‘The Future of Cinema’ (1948), yet its motivation and aesthetic features are culturally and socially rooted in the reality of mainland China. I first contextualise the act of ‘image writing’ in contemporary Chinese socio-political reality and demonstrate how this act is similarly motivated by a form of intellectual social engagement known from ancient China. I also show how ‘image writing’ inherits the aesthetics of the scattered vision and ideographic expression of the Chinese language essay, sanwen (散文), literally meaning ‘loose text’, or ‘scattered writings’ (Handler-Spitz, 2010: 113). Then I provide a detailed analysis of Zhao Liang’s Behemoth (2015) in order to show how Zhao’s thoughts are ‘written’ on the screen, both explicitly and implicitly, through the literary rhetoric such as paibi or ‘parallelism’ and hongtuo or ‘juxtaposition’.
Conference Presentations by Kiki Tianqi Yu
2012). However, amateur cinema history in China and of China still remains largely untapped because of scarcity of sources: partly due to the limited access to amateur home movie equipment in China until 1990s; and partly because accessing what is available can be very difficult.
This paper explores a recent compilation film, Around China with a Movie Camera (2015), restored and curated by the British Film Institute. The film constitutes twenty-eight sequences, selected from over a hundred, mostly amateur home movies and travelogues. Through foreigner amateur eyes, the film offers an intimate view on the everyday life in China during a tumultuous period, between 1900 and 1948. Examining the vivid ordinariness documented and extraordinary memories constructed, this paper investigates the role of various institutions and individuals in organising the making of these films at the time, their motivations and purposes. It also explores BFI’s role in rediscovering, restoring, curating and distributing this film, and the overall project ‘China On Film’ that it is a part of.
This paper argues that such valuable, yet neglected early moving-images play an important role in public memory construction, and help to revive the rich culture of everyday life in late Qing, Republican and Wartime China. It challenges assumptions of official discourses of history and of cinema history, both in the countries where the filmmakers came from, and where these images were captured. It re-generates our understandings of the role of amateur filmmaking in transcultural communication, and reflects on the flow of people and ideas internationally in the first half of twentieth century.
In this paper, I explore the aesthetics of the self as the presenter-performer in ‘one man zhibo shows’, where the presenter’s body is centralised on a personal screen, reaching to an audience whose interactions are displayed and constantly updated through danmu, live chat messages over the streaming screen. The screen of a smart phone or a tablet device becomes a frame, or a window that connects performer/presenter’s own space to the spaces of many others. In this form, zhibo is an identity technology (Poletti & Rak 2014), not merely a platform, but a space where the self is constantly in the process of construction. Zhibo embeds a complex sense of self: it is for the self as a performer to play an alternative online identity, to become a micro-celebrity, to entertain audiences; self performance or self revelation becomes entrepreneurship, identity becomes a selling point; or for the presenter-performer to search for her/his own sense of self, for recognition, for a sense of one's own existence.
The temporality of the “self” in Zhibo challenges how we think of communication, human interaction, and performance. The nonfiction live performative act of presenting the self in Zhibo questions the binary opposition of staged and non-staged, performing and non performing, real and unreal. The audience’s live interaction also contributes to the “self-making” of the presenter-performer, as well as the making of the audience’s self. The ethics of expressing and performing the self for recognition and profit will also be explored. Commercial imperatives both empower and undermine self-expression. The tangled relationship between the two reflects the complexity of the construction of self in the age of social media.
The creation of this film exemplifies some new directions of sociopolitical and economic mechanisms of documentary production in China within global context. Pitched at IDFA, and financed by a number of national and international funds and broadcasters, the production of this film offers some insights on the politics of international funding, programming and distribution of independent documentaries. Whilst Chinese independent documentaries are largely associated with covering socio-political issues, this paper also reflects on the changing course of Chinese documentary production by focusing on documentaries presenting the self expression through art, and how the surface of documentary production in China is changing, with injections from other forms of visual art practices.
Other by Kiki Tianqi Yu
"More archaeologists in the future would need to dig out digital memories/data to see what reality like today. Documentary constructs our memories."
In April 2017, I conducted two conversations with Wen Hui about her practice, in Shanghai. The first was an interview in a street café near Shanghai Theatre Academy, the second was a public conversation in the form of a Q + A, held after the screening of her Dancing with Third Grandma as part of ‘Memory Talks’ – a series of screenings of personal nonfiction films I curated as a DocLab event. What follows is an edited and condensed version of these two conversations, organized according to theme.
The conversations with Wen Hui began with Wen introducing how she started first person expression through body performance in documentary theatre, using a technique that she calls ‘bodily memory’; her collaborations with Wu Weuguang; then Wen reveals the context of making these two films with a female family member who she refers as her ‘third grandma’. We also discussed how she uses the body to interact with materials, and how filming further enables new avenues of communication. In the last part, she discusses the similarities of these two different documentary mediums, live performance and film. Wen comments on how she sees editing as a kind of choreography, and choreography as editing, her approach of having performers perform their own stories in a collaborative method of co-creation.
‘Image writing’, a concept similar to caméra-stylo that advocated by Alexandre Astruc in his influential article ‘The Future of Cinema’ (1948), yet its motivation and aesthetic features are culturally and socially rooted in the reality of mainland China. I first contextualise the act of ‘image writing’ in contemporary Chinese socio-political reality and demonstrate how this act is similarly motivated by a form of intellectual social engagement known from ancient China. I also show how ‘image writing’ inherits the aesthetics of the scattered vision and ideographic expression of the Chinese language essay, sanwen (散文), literally meaning ‘loose text’, or ‘scattered writings’ (Handler-Spitz, 2010: 113). Then I provide a detailed analysis of Zhao Liang’s Behemoth (2015) in order to show how Zhao’s thoughts are ‘written’ on the screen, both explicitly and implicitly, through the literary rhetoric such as paibi or ‘parallelism’ and hongtuo or ‘juxtaposition’.
2012). However, amateur cinema history in China and of China still remains largely untapped because of scarcity of sources: partly due to the limited access to amateur home movie equipment in China until 1990s; and partly because accessing what is available can be very difficult.
This paper explores a recent compilation film, Around China with a Movie Camera (2015), restored and curated by the British Film Institute. The film constitutes twenty-eight sequences, selected from over a hundred, mostly amateur home movies and travelogues. Through foreigner amateur eyes, the film offers an intimate view on the everyday life in China during a tumultuous period, between 1900 and 1948. Examining the vivid ordinariness documented and extraordinary memories constructed, this paper investigates the role of various institutions and individuals in organising the making of these films at the time, their motivations and purposes. It also explores BFI’s role in rediscovering, restoring, curating and distributing this film, and the overall project ‘China On Film’ that it is a part of.
This paper argues that such valuable, yet neglected early moving-images play an important role in public memory construction, and help to revive the rich culture of everyday life in late Qing, Republican and Wartime China. It challenges assumptions of official discourses of history and of cinema history, both in the countries where the filmmakers came from, and where these images were captured. It re-generates our understandings of the role of amateur filmmaking in transcultural communication, and reflects on the flow of people and ideas internationally in the first half of twentieth century.
In this paper, I explore the aesthetics of the self as the presenter-performer in ‘one man zhibo shows’, where the presenter’s body is centralised on a personal screen, reaching to an audience whose interactions are displayed and constantly updated through danmu, live chat messages over the streaming screen. The screen of a smart phone or a tablet device becomes a frame, or a window that connects performer/presenter’s own space to the spaces of many others. In this form, zhibo is an identity technology (Poletti & Rak 2014), not merely a platform, but a space where the self is constantly in the process of construction. Zhibo embeds a complex sense of self: it is for the self as a performer to play an alternative online identity, to become a micro-celebrity, to entertain audiences; self performance or self revelation becomes entrepreneurship, identity becomes a selling point; or for the presenter-performer to search for her/his own sense of self, for recognition, for a sense of one's own existence.
The temporality of the “self” in Zhibo challenges how we think of communication, human interaction, and performance. The nonfiction live performative act of presenting the self in Zhibo questions the binary opposition of staged and non-staged, performing and non performing, real and unreal. The audience’s live interaction also contributes to the “self-making” of the presenter-performer, as well as the making of the audience’s self. The ethics of expressing and performing the self for recognition and profit will also be explored. Commercial imperatives both empower and undermine self-expression. The tangled relationship between the two reflects the complexity of the construction of self in the age of social media.
The creation of this film exemplifies some new directions of sociopolitical and economic mechanisms of documentary production in China within global context. Pitched at IDFA, and financed by a number of national and international funds and broadcasters, the production of this film offers some insights on the politics of international funding, programming and distribution of independent documentaries. Whilst Chinese independent documentaries are largely associated with covering socio-political issues, this paper also reflects on the changing course of Chinese documentary production by focusing on documentaries presenting the self expression through art, and how the surface of documentary production in China is changing, with injections from other forms of visual art practices.
"More archaeologists in the future would need to dig out digital memories/data to see what reality like today. Documentary constructs our memories."