Arranged like a constellation in the gallery, Cici Wu’s eleven lantern-like sculptures—dainty constructions of bamboo and mulberry paper—are scattered on the floor, suspended from the ceiling, and perched on plinths, each illuminated from within by a flickering light paced to the frequency of a 16 mm projector. At set intervals, the lights shift. Breaking with the rhythm of twenty-four frames per second, each sculpture displays a fleeting white flash that migrates around the room, creating a code that silently marks out the notes of the Scottish folk song “Auld Lang Syne.” This roving visual melody underscores that this is less a set of distinct works than a total environment, and in the dim quiet of the space, the exhibition’s atmosphere, alive with fluttering light, demands a similar suspension of disbelief as a film. Wu describes her practice as an exercise in cinema and it is true that the room absorbs you, willing you to read it like a story.
Synonymous in the West with New Year’s Eve—the title translates roughly as “days gone by”—“Auld Lang Syne” maps differently across Asia; missionaries popularized it in Korea during the interwar period and in Japan, the tune is often played to mark the end of the school day and celebrate graduations. The Japanese lyrics draw on an old Chinese tale about two scholars studying in summer by the light of fireflies and in winter by the moon’s glow refracting off fresh snow. The sculptures’ incandescence thus takes on new meaning, at once evoking the mythic light sources and underscoring the entwined scholastic histories of the two countries. Indeed, the room is punctuated with references to the fraught dynamics between Japan and China that marked the better part of the twentieth century. One of the lanterns, a small house-like structure, is painted with the image of a Japanese girls school where a number of Chinese exchange students enrolled in the early 1900s. Against a backdrop of deteriorating relations between the two nations and early gestures toward full Japanese occupation, the delicate blooms of ink appear almost animated by the gently pulsing light, conveying an inescapable innocence.
The silhouettes of schoolgirls repeat in other works in the exhibition, making an especially poignant case study for the porous boundary between individual lives and sweeping regime change; and equally, a testament to Wu’s knack for consciously revisiting her own iconography, a move that gives the show an internal continuity that makes it feel durational, filmic. Though her practice more broadly is concerned with the vagaries of personal memory, and specifically her own relationship with Hong Kong (where she grew up), this installation finds Wu focusing on the more threatening edge of forced amnesia and taboos. Under a halo of silence, these crystalize into wider historical redactions. Here she approaches a regional history with a concentrated interest in its gaps and revisions, and especially what they come to mean as you negotiate an identity.
Wu is invested in the impacts on an individual of a place’s past: how it can never be entirely shed, only recontextualized through its evolving effects on successive generations. In this context, the forms of transit in some of the lanterns—a blimp; a train; a horse; and the Goddess Bari, who, in Korean folklore, accompanies the dead on their journey to the underworld—take on striking importance. These references to the passage of time and bodies in motion conjure the feeling of carrying a past into the present, accruing a history. In her 2002 book Traveling Concepts in the Humanities, Mieke Bal describes the impact of transit, how taking an idea native to one discipline and reframing it within the standards of another furnishes it with a fresh meaning. The new context expands the theory in the same way that a song, displaced across geography, can come to carry a multitude of hyper-precise local connotations, making it suddenly crystalline and multi-faceted. These ideas echo in Wu’s own practice: both operate where thresholds crossed represent less a transition than a careful translation, a complex shifting of matter. In Wu’s work, Bal’s words gain form, reframing cinema as a medium that moves through space as well as time.
If the lyrical light show playing out “Auld Lang Syne” transforms the works into a more holistic ensemble, the steady, projector-like flicker recalls Wu’s insistence that her medium is first and foremost cinema. And indeed, both the cinematic as an adjective, and cinema as a medium that can extend beyond the apparatus of a screen and projected moving image, feel at play here. Because what Wu’s installation ultimately exposes are the limits of a linear story structure; she offers instead a more fluid interpretation of how the lived, personal experience of narrative history, especially as it relates to memory, often flows simultaneously forward and in reverse, its impact echoing unevenly through generations. In sidestepping preconceived expectations of the cinematic form and by re-articulating it spatially, Wu suggests that this, the undetermined, the messy, the unclassifiable—though infinitely difficult to frame—is, in fact, leaps and bounds closer to something true than the comfort of our otherwise constructed histories. Which is perhaps to say that only in motion, duration, refraction, and fresh light can we ever hope to assemble a story that feels right. Wu’s installation is a reminder that demanding that consequences neatly follow action too often imposes logic where there simply is none.
