Five minutes into Isaac Julien’s multiscreen installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010), multiple histories and timelines converge on the body of a performer.1 The iconic face of Maggie Cheung appears across several screens, juxtaposed with aerial shots of ocean waves. Variations of the same close-up play on screens hung alongside one another: Cheung airborne in a white robe, spectral and otherworldly, with her hair windswept, her eyes downcast, and her head turning from side to side in search of something below. Soon, another set of images comes in: nighttime helicopter views of water and sandbars accompanied by the sound of police radio communications from a search and rescue team.
This footage would have been familiar to British viewers who followed the numerous media reports about the Morecambe Bay disaster on February 5, 2004, when twenty-three undocumented Chinese migrants from Fujian drowned while cockle picking at high tide along England’s northwest coast.2 But in Waves, the police helicopter footage is estranged from its former context, edited alongside Cheung’s aerial figure like a point-of-view shot in a montage that stitches together discontinuous time and space.
The rest of Ten Thousand Waves continues this disjunctive montage, which dislodges the Morecambe Bay story from media reports to enfold it within other timelines, real and imaginary. Julien’s multiscreen bricolage remixes material from the repositories of Chinese cinema, mythology, art, and history: reenactments of 1930s Shanghai cinema and archival footage of Mao-era street demonstrations blend with a premodern folk myth about the sea goddess Mazu. Recognizable faces of contemporary Chinese art and film also figure into this mix, including the actress Zhao Tao and the artist Yang Fudong. Most prominently, transnational film star Cheung gives her first post-retirement performance as the goddess Mazu, patroness of Chinese seafarers and a popular figure of worship among migrants from Fujian Province, including those who drowned at Morecambe Bay.3 The final third of Julien’s installation stages scenes from the Mazu myth in the style of a Chinese martial arts film: Cheung floats above a mountainous landscape like a wuxia heroine, silently guiding a group of voyagers below as they make their way across water and land.
But Julien also deploys Cheung’s performance toward another kind of intervention. Unlike the other figures in Waves, Cheung’s Mazu does not seem bound to any particular time, place, or narrative. Instead, she crosses eras, geographies, and docufictional layers, not so much an object of representation as a force of representational disorientation. Throughout the installation, Mazu’s white-robed figure trespasses into various scenes through green-screen superimposition and cross-screen montage. She floats above the high-rises of Shanghai’s Pudong business district; drifts furtively in and out of reenactments of the 1930s Chinese film classic The Goddess (1934); and, turning back to Morecambe Bay in the present, gazes with elegiac longing in juxtaposition with clips from a documentary about the drowned migrants in which the victims’ families gather and cradle photographs of the deceased.
Cheung’s performance itself is minimal, consisting of the barest of gestures: a turn of the head, an affecting look, outstretched palms. The meaning of these movements resides not in the gestures themselves but in the way they breach the spatial-temporal continuity of existing scenes, rendering the seams of incongruous worlds porous to one another.
If waves are the central visual motif of Julien’s installation, appearing time and time again as a metonym for the literal mobility of migrant existence, Cheung’s performance extends the logic of waves to the structuring of time and history. Her movements across Waves carry out a nonlinear, polycentric sense of history that disorients teleological narratives about China’s modernization and economic progress. In its temporal convolutions, Cheung’s performance can be understood to inherit Rizvana Bradley’s notion of the “diasporic time-image,” first developed by the black art scholar in response to Julien’s engagement with black diasporic subjectivity in the 1980s.4 At the same time, Cheung’s performance raises questions about how this “diasporic time-image” has mutated since Julien’s early practice: how it functions in the context of Julien’s relationship to China and how it fits into a new era of globalized and networked image circulation.
Julien emerged in the early 1980s as part of a new wave of experimental moving image artists in Britain grappling with experiences of migration shaped by the imbricating forces of postcoloniality and neoliberal capitalism.5 Alongside filmmakers from the Black Audio Film Collective and his own Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Julien eschewed the documentary realism of an earlier generation to explore a research-based approach that repurposes existing archival footage in disruptive ways.6 In particular, he applied experimental montage techniques to mainstream British depictions of black culture, resulting in works that convey the embodied time of diasporic subjects whose lives do not unfold through linear development and progress. In her essay “Explorations in Diasporic Time,” Bradley, drawing from Deleuze, identifies a new relationship between image and time in Julien’s work—the aforementioned “diasporic time-image,” in which moving images “present an imagined diasporic time as their very subject, not simply conveying time's passing but picturing the accrual and intensification of colonial history and its durational structuring of the present.”7
The sense of a nonlinear, diasporic time comes through in Julien’s early film Territories (1984), which deconstructs media representations of an Afro-Caribbean festival in Notting Hill in the wake of black youth uprisings against the British police. Julien unseats the authority of mainstream media reports by remixing them with other material. He superimposes his own footage of Afro-Caribbean life in London over them, contains them within the borders of televisions set in larger scenes, and layers multivoiced narrations about the complexities of black diasporic history on top of them.
These moves recontextualize the Notting Hill Carnival by shifting and pluralizing its temporal frame. As one voiceover muses early on: “How far should we go to begin our story, a history of Carnival. To 1976? To 1966? Or to 1959? Or should we turn to its origins in the Caribbean, in Africa, in ancient Babylon? Centuries before Christ? We are struggling to begin a story.” Rather than offer one definitive counter-history, Julien’s montage conjures a layered and cyclical sense of time attuned to the traces of multiple unending histories.
In the decades following Territories, Julien continued to upend what Bradley calls the “historically progressive representationalism of televisual documentary,” using experimental montage to produce nonlinear and pluralized senses of time and history.8 In the 2000s, Julien turned to the format of multiscreen installation to engage with histories of migration more global in scope; curator Christine Van Assche characterizes this move as his expansion from “single to multiple, local to global.”9 This expansion develops through Julien’s Expeditions trilogy—comprised of three multiscreen installations set in Europe, Africa, and the North Pole—and continues with Ten Thousand Waves, which zooms out even further, shifting from Julien’s previous focus on black diasporas to turn to China as a new point on his map of global migration.
Longer in duration and more complex in structure than Julien’s previous works, Waves is most frequently shown with nine double-sided screens hung at different heights and angles whose configuration shifts depending on the exhibition space. Its audiovisual assemblage extends beyond moving images to encompass original poetry by Wang Ping, calligraphy by Gong Fagen, and music by Jah Wobble and the Chinese Dub Orchestra. Waves also expands earlier strategies of layering and fragmentation—not only through montage, but more significantly through the movements of Cheung as Mazu, whose time-traveling, border-crossing, reference-laden figure forms the work’s iconographic centerpiece.
Waves marks Cheung’s foray into video installation art after two decades as a star of Hong Kong and global arthouse cinema. The work came six years after Cheung quit narrative film acting and, unsurprisingly, yielded a fundamentally different kind of performance from her previous projects. Mazu is Cheung’s most abstract role; stripped of nearly all narrative function. Instead, Mazu’s significance in Waves is primarily intertextual. Julien describes Cheung’s performance in Waves as citational in nature, a callback to her earlier roles: “There are certainly quotations, and when you’re working with someone like Maggie she brings with her a whole cinematic, historical legacy that’s connected to her performance."10
The most immediate references Mazu calls to mind are wuxia period films such as Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time (1994) and Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), in which Cheung plays similarly dressed martial arts heroines. But Mazu’s intertextual significance runs deeper. Indeed, the role of Mazu itself can be read as a distillation of Cheung’s entire career as a performer, a nod to her real-life status as a screen goddess of Chinese migrancy. In career-defining films that span decades, including Full Moon in New York (1989), Song of the Exile (1990), Farewell China (1990), Irma Vep (1994), Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996), Sausalito (2000), and Clean (2004), Cheung plays characters whose lives have been shaped by various kinds of migratory journeys—whether low-wage worker or global film star, rootless cosmopolitan or unassimilated immigrant.
In these performances, her body indexes the economic and geopolitical forces that condition the different waves of migration undertaken by Chinese subjects in the latter half of the twentieth century. These range from Britain’s colonial rule of Hong Kong, which frames the diasporic existence of Cheung’s character in Song of the Exile, to mainland China’s market reform and opening, whose globalizing forces carry Cheung’s character in Comrades from Guangdong to Hong Kong to New York. Together, these performances coalesce into a distinct aesthetic of migrancy that gives embodied expression and affective potency to the fragmented desires and allegiances of Chinese diasporic subjects.
As a goddess of migration, Mazu can thus be understood as a summation of Cheung’s career-long devotion to the diasporic. Cheung’s presence throughout Waves recontextualizes the scenes of modernization and migration on screen, bringing them in touch with the marginal, accented, and hybrid forms of Chineseness she has previously embodied. Her traversals across time and space produce their own diasporic time-images, in which each scene in the installation opens onto multiple others on and off screen, and history proceeds not as a straight line but as waves: a continuous ebb and flow between past and present, the local and the global, home and elsewhere.
But not all waves carry history in the same way, and not everything survives the ceaseless ebb and flow. The treacherous waves braved by migrant bodies, for example, are not the same as the waves of images that flow smoothly from screen to screen around the globe. At the conclusion of his own essay on Waves, Julien highlights this tension between different kinds of waves: “Even in feeling pride at the success of Ten Thousand Waves, I am well aware of how closely the currents that have taken the work from city to city and from continent to continent, and that we attribute to a modern international art world, resemble the currents of globalization that displaced the cockle pickers from Fujian to northwest England."11 More than an observation about the global capitalist nature of the art world, this remark gets at an increasing incommensurability between Julien’s practice and the subjects of his work. While Julien’s artmaking has followed the capitalist logic of scaling up (from single to multiple screens, local to global scope), his subjects remain those whose lives have been upended by this same logic of continuous expansion. This incommensurability plays out in Waves itself in the jarring disconnect between migrant bodies and migrant images.
If in early works like Territories, Julien’s disjunctive imagery produces a sense of lived diasporic history, in Waves, similar montage techniques do not produce the same kind of embodied historical intervention. This is due in part to Julien’s own distance from his new subject. Much of the potency of Territories comes from Julien’s firsthand immersion in the Afro-Caribbean community in London whose representation his work contests. As art historian Kobena Mercer writes of the work, “Territories is a film about black identity, or ‘self-image,’ because the ambivalence of its images … is directional; its multiaccentuality is strategically anchored to a sense of location.”12 There is lived experience underlying the metatextual commentary; Julien counterposes embodied perspectives from below against mainstream media depictions from above.
In Waves, on the other hand, the metatextuality lacks a sense of location or direction because Julien’s relationship to China has only ever been mediated by representations (in cinema, contemporary art, news reports, and so on).13 During his visits there, he did not venture outside the circuits of the global culture industry (biennials, galleries, film festivals), and his years of research for Waves did not entail any firsthand interactions with Chinese migrants and their movement networks, only the search for and gathering of pre-existing media. Though much of the footage in Waves was shot on location in China, the images themselves mostly reproduce established tropes and iconographies (the rickshaws and cheongsams of 1930s Shanghai, the mountainous landscape of the martial arts genre). These are not images of China itself so much as images of tropes of Chineseness: images of other images.
In interviews, Julien has invoked his engagement with postcolonial studies as the basis for a different kind of relation to China from the usual Westerner.14 There is real potential in Julien’s position as a black diasporic subject to illuminate historical entanglements between black and Chinese migrants displaced by the same forces of Western colonialism and empire—what scholar Lisa Lowe has called “‘intimacies’ among the colonized."15 But no such vision of Afro-Asian relation emerges in Waves. In fact, Asian critics have taken note of the oddly artificial and aimless nature of Julien’s engagement with China overall.16
While this lack of criticality can be attributed to Julien’s relationship to China, it also reflects broader shifts in digital media technology that have reshaped contemporary visual culture. Julien’s early work challenged dominant representations by creating fractured, nonlinear, and multiperspectival modes of looking, but in the age of the internet, these modes have become the default forms of spectatorship. Indeed, the experience of viewing Waves bears remarkable similarity to the distracted looking that defines online literacy in the attention economy, in which viewers continuously toggle between different screens and information streams. As art historian Claire Bishop notes, this “digital logic” has permeated contemporary art since the 1990s, when research-based art installations began to replicate the function of the online search engine—aggregating and displaying large quantities of information for viewers to sift through without taking any distinct position.17
In Julien’s installation, the aimless aggregation of the internet takes the form of spatialized moving images. If the metatextual montage of Territories adds historical dimension to contemporary crisis, in Waves, the heterogeneous mix of visual quotations and signposts does not amount to any coherent historicization. It’s not clear, for example, how the migrants at Morecambe Bay relate to The Goddess, the Chinese film classic about a sex worker in 1930s Shanghai that Julien restages extensively with the actress Zhao Tao. Nor is it clear what new historical insights into Chinese migration we glean from the archival footage of Mao-era youth marches interspersed midway through the montage. In these and other sequences, Julien offers imagery that evokes a generic sense of Chinese historicity without in fact tracing any specific histories.
What is palpably missing from Waves are the embodied perspectives of Chinese migrants themselves. Though Waves opens with the perishing of real migrant bodies, the fragmentary streams of images that follow seem curiously untethered from these bodies, or, indeed, from any bodies. There is a sense of groundlessness here that demonstrates what Bishop describes as the conflation of search and research in research-based art of the internet era. Whereas search involves “the adaptation of one’s ideas to the language of ‘search terms’—pre-existing concepts most likely to throw up results,” research involves “asking fresh questions and elaborating new terminologies yet to be recognized by the algorithm."18
Bishop articulates this distinction between search and research by invoking British artist Mark Leckey’s definition of research as a fundamentally embodied process: “Research has to go through a body; it has to be lived in some sense—transformed into some sort of lived experience—in order to become whatever we might call art."19 The fresh seeing and original thinking that define research-as-art cannot be produced outside of the lived duration of embodied experience.
In Waves, the closest we get to such an embodied perspective comes in the form of Cheung, Chinese cinema’s migrant body par excellence. But whereas in her narrative film roles, Cheung’s body serves as both a stand-in for other migrant bodies and as a real migrating body that crosses physical borders in the production process, in Waves, Cheung is oddly disembodied. Rather than moving through durational performances of affect, Cheung is constrained within brief close-ups in Julien’s montage. She does not perform so much as appear—across different settings, eras, and narratives—to carry out processes of juxtaposition and layering. Within the tight frames of the close-up, Cheung functions less as migrant body and more as migrant image, operating not in the deep space of the long take but across the dispersed surfaces of the multiscreen montage.
This flattening of body into image is carried out by Julien’s production process as well. Whereas Cheung’s previous diasporic performances emphasize embodied journeys and interactions with local spaces, in Waves, Cheung’s border-crossings are artificially constructed. Cheung does not physically travel to Morecambe Bay or Shanghai, for example, but is only virtually transported there via montage and superimposition; sometimes, a stunt double replaces her altogether. Julien makes this process explicit throughout Waves, with shots featuring the green screen, stunt double, kung fu wires, and technicians that come together to make Mazu’s on-screen “movements” possible.
The groundlessness of Cheung’s movements in Waves comes through literally in the way Mazu’s aerial body hovers like a phantom without landing from scene to scene. On the one hand, this hovering can be read as a metaphor for the effects of liminality and suspension that serve as Cheung’s performative signature, what I have elsewhere theorized as Cheung’s aesthetic of “disappearance.”20 This aesthetic refers to the way Cheung functions as a counterdiscursive force within narrative films, deploying performance against representation and the moving body against fixed identity to open space for transient and translational modes of being.
In Waves, however, Cheung’s disappearance effect is unanchored from any particular historical context. As migrant image rather than migrant body, Cheung does not chart an embodied history of migration. Instead, her moving body functions more like a digital hyperlink—a point of tangential connection that enables us to drift endlessly through time and space without any real direction.
Cheung’s body thus carries us from the waves at Morecambe Bay, to the waves of twentieth-century Chinese diasporas, to, finally, the digital waves of the World Wide Web. Here, Bradley’s “diasporic time-image” seems to mutate into what media theory scholar Robert Hassan calls the “network time” of the internet: “a smashing of the uniform and universal linearity of the clock into a billion different time contexts within the network.”21 Within this network time, different eras, settings, and cultures exist simultaneously and flow into one another in an ocean of information.
In embodying both diasporic time and network time, Cheung in Waves illuminates how the logic of waves can devolve into the logic of streams. Curiously, Cheung’s acting career came to an end right at the advent of online video streaming. YouTube, the first popular streaming site, was founded in 2005, the year Cheung unceremoniously disappeared from the world of narrative cinema. The border-crossing performances that define Cheung’s career can thus be read as historical artifacts, records of the relationship between migrant body and migrant image in the era before streaming, when moving images still had to cross borders physically as material objects like film reels, VHS tapes, and DVDs.22
In her post-retirement performance in Waves, Cheung thus operates as a transitional figure, teetering between analog and digital media. In those brief close-up shots, Cheung comes to us as we might encounter her online today—suspended and decontextualized in short-form content designed to be viewed quickly before disappearing into a stream of other images. Through Cheung’s journey, we see how easily the migrant image can untether from the migrant body and are left to ponder what it might still mean for images to conjure a sense of lived history or embodied time in our increasingly virtual and deglobalizing present.
The configuration and number of screens in Ten Thousand Waves vary depending on exhibition space. It is most often exhibited across nine screens but a three-screen version has also been shown. There is also a single-screen version called Better Life as well as a series of photographs. Documentation of how these various versions have been exhibited is available on the artist’s website: www.isaacjulien.com/projects/ten-thousand-waves/. My analysis of the work here draws primarily from a three-screen composite video shared with me by Isaac Julien’s studio, as well as photographic documentation of the nine-screen installation exhibited at MoMA in 2013–14.
Some British media that incorporate this helicopter footage include the TV documentary “Death On The Bay” (an episode of the TV show Real Crime from 2008) and BBC reports like this one: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-25986388.
Mazu (媽祖) is the second most popular female deity in China after the Buddhist deity Guanyin. Mazu transliterates to “mother ancestor” in Chinese. She is known as tianhou in Mandarin or tin hau in Cantonese, meaning “empress of heaven,” and is worshipped widely in Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
Rizvana Bradley, “Explorations in Diasporic Time” in Artists’ Moving Images in Britain Since 1989, edited by Erika Balsom, Lucy Reynolds, and Sarah Perks (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2019), 72.
This new wave of moving image artworks on migration gave rise to what T. J. Demos would come to term the “migrant image.” See T.J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013).
See Kobena Mercer, “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetic of Black Independent Film in Britain” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), 53.
Rizvana Bradley, “Explorations in Diasporic Time” in Artists’ Moving Images in Britain Since 1989, edited by Erika Balsom, Lucy Reynolds, and Sarah Perks (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2019), 72.
Bradley, 74.
Christine Van Assche, “Single to Multiple, Local to Global,” in Isaac Julien: Riot (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013) 179.
Andrew Maerkle, “Not Global, Trans-local: Interview with Isaac Julien” in Ten Thousand Waves (London: Victoria Miro Gallery, 2010), 105.
Julien, “Screen,” in Isaac Julien: Riot, 198.
Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 60.
In interviews, Julien has mentioned he grew up watching Chinese martial arts films and drew much of the imagery of Waves from them. See Andrew Maerkle, “Not Global, Trans-local: Interview with Isaac Julien” and Stuart Jeffries, “Isaac Julien’s angel of Morecambe,” The Guardian, September 29, 2010. →
In one interview, Julien remarks: “post-colonial studies have given me tools to look at questions from a different position than that of a typical western outsider—which I know I am—in the hope that I can be ‘creolized’ through a dialogue with the Chinese collaborators on the project.” Maerkle, “Not Global, Trans-Local: Interview with Isaac Julien.” 100-101.
Lisa Lowe has written on the shared struggles of Chinese indentured laborers and African slaves in the British West Indies and how their social bonds exemplify “‘intimacies’ among the colonized” that breach the boundaries of racial division and hierarchy maintained by British colonial authorities. See Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), 35.
See, for example, Yingjin Zhang, “Ways of Seeing China through Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves: Evocative Translocality, Fantastic Orientalism, Nameless Labor,” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16, no. 1 (March 2019); and Keiko Okamura, “Isaac Julien: Ten Thousand Waves,” Flash Art, October 2010.
Some examples of such research-based practices include recent installations by artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Zoe Leonard, and Maryam Jafri. See Claire Bishop, “Information Overload: Research-based Art,” in Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (London and New York: Verso, 2024), 37–76.
Bishop, 56.
Mark Leckey as quoted in Bishop, 74.
I elaborate on the multivalent meaning of “disappearance” in Cheung’s performance practice in my ongoing dissertation project Performing Disappearance: Maggie Cheung On and Off Screen.
Robert Hassan, “Network Time” in 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Network Society, edited by Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 51
For more on how the rise of video streaming transformed arthouse film distribution, see Lucas Hilderbrand, “The Art of Distribution,” Film Quarterly 64, no. 2 (Winter 2010), 24–28.
