8 - Outcries and Whispers: Digital Political Mimesis and Radical Feminist Documentary

Summary

“I still treat documentary as art, or a kind of art of thought.”

—Ai Xiaoming

“Art is ultimately useless. … But now, it intricately and actively enters–– and is compelled to enter––the terrain of power.”

—Zeng Jinyan

Abstract

Chapter 8 elaborates the political and aesthetic significance of leading feminist scholar, cultural critic, and activist Ai Xiaoming's documentary films in tandem with those of Zeng Jinyan. It does so in relation to a digital political mimesis borne out of the widespread adoption of DV by media activists in China in the new century and its subsequent suppression and dispersion into internal and external exile.

Keywords: activist video, digital political mimesis, animation, citizen documentation, state violence, exile

I came to know the work of Ai Xiaoming 艾晓明 (b. 1953) and Zeng Jinyan 曾金燕 (b. 1983) around 2007 in connection with my research and curatorial work on Chinese independent cinema. They were considered peripheral figures by the predominantly male indie circle invested largely in a mix of cinephilia arthouse and “avant-garde” contemporary art aesthetics. Ai is famous for being the first woman PhD after the Cultural Revolution and an outspoken feminist scholar and activist. She began to publish social commentaries in newspapers on the sars outbreak and later online about the Sun Zhigang 孙志刚 incident in 2003, regarded by activists and netizens as “the start year of the citizen rights movement.” Ai's activist work, including writing and filming with a strong feminist agenda, won her a Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women's Freedom Award in 2010. A generation younger than Ai, Zeng became an activist, first in support of her civil rights activist ex-husband Hu Jia and then in her own right. She was named one of the 100 Pioneers and Heroes by Time Magazine in 2007 for her fearless blogging on environmental and human rights issues in China.

In 2012 my path crossed with both again. On April 19, 2012, when southern China was already in full-fledged summer bathed in monsoon rain and humidity, I traveled by train from the New Territories in Hong Kong to Guangzhou. Ai invited me to give a talk and have a conversation with her and her graduate students at the Sun Yat-sen University where she was teaching. This was our second meeting since her brief visit to New York four years earlier.