In-dependent Art Shi-Nema: Decomposing the Main Melody via Monu-mental Time-Images

Although emerging from the distinct worlds of architecture and film, this chapter shows how Wang Shu’s Ningbo Historic Museum and Jia Zhangke’s World Expo film I Wish I Knew (2010) share the same underlying “abstract diagram.” The significant form of these affective Urban Generation artworks clearly channel the forces of shi in order to transmit discordant signals that interfere with, and deterritorialise, the dominant political “main melody,” which the artists’ Chinese Communist Party commissioners originally charged them with celebrating. Creatively adapting a hybrid model of Gilles Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image regimes here helps expose how Wang’s government building (built from the bulldozed ruins of old Ningbo city) and Jia’s official Expo film (partially composed from fragments of Shanghai cinematicity) materially innervate a political “event of thought.”