Dong

While filming In Public (2001), Jia Zhang-Ke conceived of its fictional sequel, Unknown Pleasures (2002). Here, he experiments with filming both the reality and the fiction – deployed in Still Life – of the building site, which for him serves as a gigantic metaphor for what his country is going through: the construction of the world's largest hydroelectric dam, on the Yangtze River in the Three Gorges Valley. The documentary piece, Dong, was inspired by the figurative painter Liu Xiaodong who, in "a race against light", set out to paint the demolishers, employing the sheer force of mass to destroy the walls of a thousand-year-old city soon to be engulfed by the rising waters. Jia Zhang-Ke then followed his work, this time in Bangkok, with a group of women. Much more than an artist's portrait, the conceit of which he nevertheless sometimes adopts, Dong searches for its motif while it develops it, bringing together two different practices haunted by a single question: what is the relationship between reality and its representation, whether one is a painter or a filmmaker?
Emmanuel Chicon

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, 2020
Ash is Purest White, 2018
The Hedonists, 2016
Mountains May Depart, 2015
A Touch of Sin, 2013
Yulu, 2011
I Wish I Knew, 2010
Stories on Human Rights, 2008
Cry Me a River, 2008
24 City, 2008
Our Ten Years, 2007
Useless, 2007
Still Life, 2006
Dong, 2006
The World, 2004
Unknown Pleasures, 2002
The Condition of Dogs, 2001
In Public, 2001
Platform, 2000
Pickpocket, 1997
Du Du, 1996
Xiao Shan going Home, 1995