Abstract
Wu Wenguang's article ‘Back to the Site: Documentary as I Understand It’ is one of the first attempts to theorize the Chinese concept of xianchang, or working on site. A location-based practice common to filmmakers and experimental artists, xianchang evolved in 1990s China both as a reaction against Socialist Realist aesthetics, and as an attempt to recuperate their socially engaged potential. This introduction explores Wu's understanding of the distinct spatial, temporal, and everyday qualities of xianchang, while locating the emergence of on-site practices in relation to the period's rapid socio-economic changes, particularly the challenges and opportunities presented by large-scale urbanization.
The significance of “Back to the Site: Documentary as I Understand It” lies in its exploration of the Chinese artistic practice known as xianchang. As the film scholar Zhang Zhen notes, the term is multivalent. Popularized in the 1990s as a vernacular word for the construction sites (shigong xianchang) that characterized China's urban transformation across the decade, it was also used to describe the live news reporting featured on the new nonfiction television formats from the same period. Its most audacious manifestations, however, were in the experimental art and independent filmmaking scenes.1 Here, fiction filmmakers, documentary directors, and artists all adopted variations on the practice to engage with the rapid transformation of Chinese society following the failure of the 1989 Tiananmen Movement and Deng Xiaoping's re-energizing of “reform and opening up” (gaige kaifang) after 1992. Xianchang has continued to inform independent moving-image practices well into the 21st century, as practitioners have refined the concept and taken it in new directions.2 The Document essay, published by independent filmmaker Wu Wenguang in the magazine Orient in 1996—made available in English for the first time in this issue of ARTMargins—is therefore one of the first attempts to theorize a concept central to experimental cultural production not only in 1990s China but also today.
Xianchang is a difficult term both to define and to translate. Zhang Zhen, who provides one of the earliest glosses in English, describes it as a “tangible sense of being ‘on the scene’” that gives the film image a “feel of actuality and liveness.”3 As both method and aesthetic, it is thus intensely material in orientation. In this translation of Wu's article, we have elected to use “site” over “scene,” due to the latter word's associations with theater and the fictional—qualities from which Wu is here seeking to distance himself.
Wu uses xianchang in three primary ways that overlap with, and expand on, Zhang's definition. First, in the slightly modified form of zai chang, he understands it to mean “on-site” or “being on site.” In creative terms, this is the practice of shooting or working on location. Second, he uses xianchang to mean a specific time and space. This is the timespace integral to “being on site,” the time-space of a location-based artistic practice. Finally, Wu uses xianchang to mean “on-site” in a more metaphysical sense: as the essence of what he looks for in a documentary. When used in this manner, the term often appears in quotation marks, which have been retained in this translation. This meaning of xianchang includes, but also exceeds, feelings of liveness and immediacy, and this speaks to a certain ethical charge that Wu associates with the concept, particularly in relation to issues of authenticity and realism. The director considers all three of these meanings essential to xianchang as both form and practice.
The space of xianchang is explicitly the space outside the art, film, or television studio. In Wu's essay it appears as an outdoor space, exemplified by the street scene from the Japanese documentary Who Does the Land Belong To?, which Wu recalls his friend Chen Zhen describing, and as the type of public space that features in the documentaries of American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman—the hospital, zoo, school: locations through which people come and go on their day-to-day business. Crucially, xianchang is therefore also the space of the quotidian. For Wu, moving outside the studio allows one to engage directly with the everyday reality of ordinary people. It enables artists or filmmakers to reconnect with the social by immersing themselves in their immediate environment. Since this process requires the director to be physically co-present with their subjects, who must be “observed and followed by the human eye,” it is charged with both intersubjective and democratic potential. To share the same space as your subjects—and even, in the case of on-site performance, your audience—therefore requires a certain unlearning of artistic authority in favor of a humbler, more equal relationship with one's surroundings. This understanding helps explain Wu's stated preference for the tracking shot as being central to the preservation of the “on-site” experience, since this technique both allows the director to explore such locations and helps convey directly to the viewer the camera's embedded position within a location. It also underpins Wu's use of the term maker rather than director, which carries a rather different creative valence.
If xianchang was thus distinct from the more privately oriented modes of expression that many artists adopted in the immediate wake of 1989, it was also an attempt to distance creative production from the by-now-discredited representational strategies of Socialist Realism. In its Chinese inflections—notably Revolutionary Realism and Proletarian Realism—Socialist Realism was a prescriptive aesthetic. It aimed not simply to represent reality as it appeared, but also to reveal “a truer reality that lies beneath the surface or is yet to be fully realized … encourag[ing] the awareness or realization of that higher or deeper reality by presenting it as an abstracted form or ideal.”4 In emphasizing the significance of ordinary people, common places, and concrete details, xianchang as a spatial practice opened up art and film to a reality that appeared less ideologically prescriptive and truer to life. This was also the case temporally. In his essay, Wu channels the Japanese documentary director Ogawa Shinsuke by describing on-site temporality as being connected to process, specifically to the filmmaker's capture of a complete action on the part of the documentary subject. There are echoes of André Bazin in this passage, which are reinforced by Wu's emphasis on the importance of the long take in maintaining the integrity of the documentary image; both concepts reflect a certain lack of trust in the ideological function of editing, its ability to obscure as much as it reveals.5 But this temporality is also very much of the moment. Capturing a complete action requires the filmmaker to focus on what is happening now as well as here. In “Back to the Site,” xianchang temporality is therefore a real-time temporality, manifesting for the documentary filmmaker in the activities of their film's subjects as captured via the long take.
In a discussion of work by Wu and a younger contemporary, the filmmaker Jia Zhangke, the film scholar Chris Berry has described “time in the present” as being “post-socialist.”6 Where socialist time was utopian and future-orientated, undergirded by a belief in teleological progress, post-socialist time had lost this conviction and any concomitant sense of temporal direction. Berry consequently reads the extended takes and “distended rhythm and pace” of a feature film like Jia's Xiao Wu (1997) as critiques of both capitalist progress narratives and the ideological claims of Socialist Realism.7 I would argue that Wu's insistence on the “now-ness” of xianchang is driven in part by similar convictions. What distinguishes “Back to the Site” from Xiao Wu, however, is its lack of pessimism. Jia's film seems to offer little hope for its central character, who is trapped both temporally and spatially. In contrast, in Wu's essay, refocusing on the now enables the filmmaker to reinvigorate both his practice and his perspective.
“Back to the Site” thus provides one route out of the conundrum faced by many Chinese artists and filmmakers in the Reform Era: how to shed the ideological presuppositions of Socialist Realism without jettisoning its social commitments. The essay does so, however, in response to the primary driver of social change in 1990s China: rapid urbanization. Between 1980 and 2002, city dwellers grew from 20 percent to 40 percent of China's total population, with the fastest increase in the urban population occurring between 1990 and 2000.8 While this experience is never referenced directly in Wu's essay, it is striking that the Japanese examples he invokes—the bustling commercial streets of Tokyo and the resistance to the city's infrastructural expansion epitomized by the villagers of Sanrizuka—echo the Chinese experience of urban change during this period, with its corollaries of commodification and dispossession. We can therefore understand the immanent urgency of xianchang's “here and now” aesthetic as a response to the disorienting speed of post-1992 urbanization and a sign of its practitioners’ drive to observe and document as a reaction against the erasure of history and memory that accompanied this thoroughgoing social reorientation from the countryside to the city.9 Wu Wenguang's commitment to authenticity and witnessing, as well as his resistance to the established docudramatic methods that characterized nonfiction filmmaking during the Maoist period, reflects such motivations. But working on-site also presented artists and filmmakers with the possibility of intervening in this process, not simply recording it. The time-space of xianchang thus created an opportunity not just to observe change in the present but also to effect it.
Beyond a commitment to the “here and now,” Wu Wenguang does not mandate what such interventions should look like or toward what ends they should be directed. “Back to the Site” is comparatively open-ended in this regard, suggesting the author's desire to leave room for individual artistic agency. But this indeterminacy also reflects the fluidity of xianchang as a practice when the essay was first published. On-site practices in the 1990s varied considerably, both formally and in their politics. Robin Visser, for example, frames the site-specific work of Beijing-based artists such as Song Dong and Zhang Dali as direct, if not entirely successful, intercessions into city space that sought to resist commercial discourses of urban development in the Chinese capital.10 In contrast, Nancy P. Lin argues that the work of the Guangzhou-based Big Tail Elephant Working Group deployed a more indirect strategy of “urban insertion” that endeavored less to disrupt and more to work with their immediate environment, while still allowing the artists to reflect on critical issues concerning urbanization, commercialization, globalization, and labor.11 Practitioners had to gauge how explicitly to engage the prevailing socioeconomic currents and the state's urban visual regime—in other words, how far they would go in using xianchang to draw public attention to the costs and benefits of China's new direction—on a case-by-case basis. Indeed, within five years, in his 2001 essay collection The Camera Lens Is Like One's Own Eyes, Wu Wenguang would himself partly step back from the position advocated here, in favor of a more individual, personal approach to filmmaking, even as more overtly political practitioners, from artists such as Ai Weiwei to feminist activists such as Ai Xiaoming, began to take xianchang in more explicitly activist directions.12 “Back to the Site” therefore provides a window onto a historical moment when the parameters and practices of location-based creative production in China were unstable, allowing us to see one of its earliest practitioners working through questions that, almost thirty years later, still remain pertinent.
Zhang Zhen, “Transfiguring the Postsocialist City: Experimental Image-Making in Contemporary China,” in Cinema at the City's Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia, ed. Yomi Braester and James Tweedie (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 108. Independent filmmaking here indicates filmmaking outside official state media structures, most obviously marked by a refusal to submit films for approval by the censors, which is essential for cinematic distribution and exhibition in China.
See, for example, J. P. Sniadecki, “The Cruelty of the Social: Xianchang, Intersubjectivity, and Interobjectivity,” in DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film, ed. Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), 57–75.
Zhang Zhen, “Introduction: Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of ‘Transformation’ (Zhuanxing),” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Zhang Zhen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 18.
Jason McGrath, Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 18.
For the influence of Bazin and long-take aesthetics in China after the Cultural Revolution, see Cecile Lagesse, “Bazin and the Politics of Realism in Mainland China,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 316–23.
Chris Berry, “Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism,” in Zhang, The Urban Generation, 124–25.
Chris Berry, “Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By,” in Chinese Films in Focus II, ed. Chris Berry (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 254.
You-tien Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2; Ligang Song and Sheng Yu, “Rapid Urbanisation and Implications for Growth in China,” in The China Boom and Its Discontents, ed. Ross Garnaut and Ligang Song (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2005), 109.
Zhang, “Introduction,” 20–21.
Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 158–74.
Nancy P. Lin, “Urban Insertion as Artistic Strategy: The Big Tail Elephant Working Group in 1990s Guangzhou,” in Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China: Urbanized Interfaces, ed. Minna Valjakka and Meiqin Wang (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 181–208.
Zhang Zhen, “Towards a Digital Political Mimesis: Aesthetic of Affect and Activist Video,” in Zhang and Zito, DV-Made China, 316–45; Zhang Zhen, Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023), 251–86.