It feels like it was both a century ago and just yesterday when news of a mysterious coronavirus first started to spread across the globe. In warping our experiences of time, the pandemic has drawn attention to the unstable nature of how we relate past with present.
In ’s March/April 2021 issue, we spotlight two artists whose conceptions of time reveal the messy entanglements between historic and contemporary realms. For our cover Feature, associate editor (2019), for example, a Red Guard narrates a ghost story about a scholar who commits suicide because his mother had died before he could repay his filial debt. Meanwhile, on screen, the life of a writer in contemporary China unfolds, revealing uncanny resonances between him and the scholar. More recently, Wang has become interested in shamanism as a model for accessing multidimensional views of time and place. This has inspired his latest two projects, focused on the 1948 Siege of Changchun. “The real object of my practice is history. I take the form of the shaman when I look at those moments in history. I fly up and see a great span of time and space down below,” he tells Lai.
