2023.03.10 Friday 19:00
Location
2F, The Cloister Apartments, 62 West Fuxing Road, Shanghai
Speaker: Nelson Zhang
Cinema is the ultimate perverted art——it doesn't give you what you desire, but tells you how to desire.
------ Slavoj Žižek
Žižek refers to cinema as “the ultimate perverted art”, because cinema guide us in the way we dream. These dreams represent our unconscious desires and logics. Thus from cinema, we could get a grip on the psychoanalytic practices and concepts proposed by Jacques Lacan. Hong Kong cinema have very similar logic to the dreamwork which prevails in Southeastern culture, though the structures in HK cinema often appear to be secular or vulgar. Is it possible for us to apply Hegel’s proposition – ‘Spirit is a bone’ (a combination of the most abstract, the spirit, and the most physical, the bone) – to perform an abstract psychoanalysis on the most secular works in HK cinema? We hope that we can investigate and analyze the logics and forces that guide people’s desires in those films.
Nelson Zhang: Visiting professor at Chinese National Academy of Arts. He holds a Doctor’s degree of philosophy at Tsinghua University. He is the founder of the Philosophy 01 program at Hongkong Cultural Channel, the chief editor of DL. media. He is also a journalist and art critic for various art media.
VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.
