M+ Screenings: Forty Years reveals history of Chinese contemporary arts

Building on the success of the first M+ Screenings, M+, the museum for visual culture at the West Kowloon Cultural District, launches M+ Screenings: Forty Years this March, which is organised in conjunction with the exhibition M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art.

M+ Screenings: Forty Years will take place from 11 to 13 March at Broadway Cinematheque in Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong. It will present works by seven renowned film makers and artists, including Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo – Cina, Wen Pulin’s Seven Sins, Wang Xiaoshuai’s Frozen, Hu Jie’s Artists of Yuanmingyuan and Kan Xuan’s Art for Sale.”

The programme will open with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo – Cina (1973), which is a rare non- official visual record of China during the Cultural Revolution. It will be followed by Wen Pulin’s Seven Sins (1989-2009), a documentary on seven performances in the 1989 groundbreaking exhibition China/Avant- garde that changed the face of contemporary art in Beijing.

The works produced in the 1990s include the fictional films of Frozen (1996) by Wang Xiaoshuai and An Estranged Paradise (1997-2002) by Yang Fudong, as well as three documentaries featuring Chinese artists and exhibitions amid the rise of globalisation: Hu Jie’s Artists of Yuanmingyuan (1995), Kan Xuan’s Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies & Delusion (1999) and Art For Sale (1999). Representing the present, we have Tao Hui’s The Dusk of Teheran (2014), an artist video that transcends the concept of boundaries and time, in a nod to the heyday of Hong Kong’s pop music scene.

Highlighting the diverse nature of moving image, the year-long M+ Screenings will develop a number of upcoming screenings, each with a different theme that will keep its contents timely, relevant, and interesting for Hong Kong’s cinema-going public.