Li Chen’s hometown, Shenzhen, is often labelled as a city ‘without history’. In 2020, Chinese President Xi described the city as ‘a blank sheet of paper’ on which socialism with Chinese characteristics was wonderfully interpreted. In 2022, blank paper resurfaced in a radically different context. Held by Chinese protesters against the zero-COVID policy, blank paper became an empty screen onto which dissent is projected.
These two ‘blank paper’ cases serve as departure points to explore the paradoxical, politically-charged emptiness in contemporary China. Chen works with the Chinese concept of kong (空), whose meaning exists on a conceptual continuum between emptiness, void, and nothingness. It is connected to a device in Chinese filmmaking, kong jingtou, or the ‘empty shot’, which threads Chen’s practice. The aim of this research is to combine a cinematic reimagination of kong with an intervention of the phenomenon of historical amnesia.
This research involves three interrelated elements. An autoethnographic study is conducted to delineate the socio-political context that necessitates new modes of articulation and to inform the process of artistic experimentation. The experimentation aims to develop new artistic variations on the ‘empty shot’. This process is accompanied by an exploration of the origins of Kong and a diffractive reading of Eastern and Western philosophical thinking on the subject. Examples from film and visual art practices that deal with repressed histories and memories are analysed to trace shared strategies of implicit expression.
A guiding question throughout the research is: How can the Chinese concept of kong be reinterpreted to generate new vocabulary in film and beyond to address the haunting of historical memory and to reclaim the capacity to search for one’s own history?
Li Chen (b. 1986, China) is a visual artist and filmmaker. She holds a BA in film production from Griffith University in Australia and an MA in film curating from Birkbeck College, University of London in the UK. She was also an artistic research fellow in the PreDoc program in Performing Arts and Film at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland.
Her practice is deeply influenced by Asian minimalist cinema, with a particular interest in the Chinese concept of the “empty shot”. This aesthetic informs her transdisciplinary work across moving image, photography, writing, and installation. She experiments with the empty shot image to explore the entanglement of memory, history, and emotion in the contemporary landscapes. Besides her artistic work, Li Chen is an accomplished documentary filmmaker. Her documentary films have been exhibited at the Shanghai Urban Space Season, the Beijing International Music Festival, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.