The Aesthetics of “Northern Remnants” in Video Art from China

Abstract Since around the turn of the 21st century, contemporary multimedia artists and filmmakers from China have employed the moving image as a tool to capture temporalities shaped by urban-industrial decline in northern China. A counterpoint to massive economic prosperity within the Pearl River Delta, fueled by investments in new technologies and globalizing industries since Deng Xiaoping-era reforms, northern manufacturing zones have witnessed the dismantling of labor-driven forms of socialized production. Throughout the north, once thriving factory complexes and surrounding locales have been reduced to a ghostly shell of their former selves. Artists Wang Bing (b. 1967), Wang Mowen (b. 1989), and Cao Fei (b. 1978) each reference ghosts of cultural memory through visual presentations of bygone monuments from China's mid-20th century socialist past. These artists' moving image practices also point to a broader regional phenomenon in which divestment in northern Chinese socialized industrial production has fostered the accumulation of “northern remnants,” aesthetically marked by rust, melancholy, and slowness.