Karimah Ashadu 

aaajiao

Kobby Adi

Ryoko Aoki

Cory Arcangel

Martha Atienza

Ed Atkins

Charles Atlas

Darren Bader

Martin Beck

Dara Birnbaum

Zheng Bo

Dineo Seshee Bopape

Nate Boyce

Sonia Boyce

Candice Breitz

Maeve Brennan

Duncan Campbell

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Monster Chetwynd

Kwan Sheung Chi

Adam Chodzko

Chan Hau Chun

Tony Cokes

Stephanie Comilang

Alex Da Corte

Jeremy Deller

Yang Dingliu

Shannon Ebner

Angus Fairhurst

Jes Fan

Luke Fowler

Nikita Gale

Theaster Gates

Samia Halaby

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Richard Hawkins

Rei Hayama

James T. Hong

Jonathan Horowitz

Miyu Hosoi

Tishan Hsu

Andrew Thomas Huang

Tao Hui

Yee I-Lann

Evan Ifekoya

Takahiro Inamori

AKI INOMATA

Derek Jarman

Yu Ji

Eisa Jocson

Joan Jonas

Corinne de San Jose

Mike Kelley

Sin Wai Kin

Lee Kit

Vvzela Kook

Friedrich Kunath

Alan Kwan

Tang Kwok-Hin

Quỳnh Lâm

Christopher Landoni

Carolyn Lazard

Mark Leckey

Kang Seung Lee

Florence Yuk-ki Lee

Lawrence Lek

Shuang Li

Klara Liden

Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien

Jill Magid

Diego Marcon

Helen Marten

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Shala Miller

Sarah Morris

Takeshi Murata

Shirin Neshat

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

Ho Tzu Nyen

Lydia Ourahmane

Tony Oursler

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Yuri Pattison

Ellen Pau

Imran Perretta

Sondra Perry

Paul Pfeiffer

Thao Nguyen Phan

Wong Ping

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Ingrid Pollard

Xiaofei Mo & POND

Kobby Adi & Nina Porter

Walid Raad

Oliver Payne & Nick Relph

James Richards

Robert Sandler

Aki Sasamoto

Shimabuku

Yves Klein famously said that his first artwork was the blue sky. He was lying on the beach in Nice with friends when he claimed it. In the ensuing decades the colour came to represent limitlessness in his work and the capacity to grasp the immaterial. Blue coursed through monochromatic paintings, sculptures and the new hue he developed, known as International Klein Blue.

A static field of this intense ultramarine blue is the only image in Derek Jarman’s 

 (1993), his final film before he died from AIDS-related complications. He loved the colour, and as he began to lose his vision towards the end of his life he experienced flashes of blue in one eye. In the film’s soundtrack

 Jarman and others read excerpts from his writings, recall his art and contemplate mortality. The film has become one of the most vivid accounts of its time, for commemorating the too many lives lost to AIDS and for turning dying into art. The boundlessness of Klein’s blue here became a means to suspend Jarman’s artistic vision between life and afterlife. ‘I have walked behind the sky,’ the artist says at one point.

The film and video works in this programme also take loss and the aftermath of disaster – large and small – as material. Like seizing the sky or giving grief a colour, each piece finds a way to visualize emotional and material effects that are otherwise hard to see.

 as well as a homage to Jarman. Made during a residency in Prospect Cottage – Jarman’s storied home in Dungeness, on the Kent coastline – Fowler’s 16mm film emulates aspects of 

’s soundtrack and draws from Jarman’s earlier Super-8 experiments, particularly his very first film, 

 (1971), which documented his then home-studio from inside and out. The chime of a bell commences both films. Like the original, 

 is overlaid with fragmented voices, including Jarman’s, here combined with ambient sounds of the house and its surroundings: groaning floorboards, the force of wind against walls, waves sweeping across sand. Instead of the sustained blue, Fowler creates a vivid portrait of the cottage, of things Jarman made and could see while alive: spectacular sunsets, his iconic garden, his belongings, his art, even his writing playfully etched across numerous surfaces around the house. ‘Dear hinney beast I love you. when your in a growler stew your looka eyes suit you F.B.’, reads one such message scratched into clear resin. Anyone who has trekked to Dungeness to see Prospect Cottage knows that it embodies Jarman’s artistic vision. In 

, the site is further animated, the steady blue swapped for new ways to see the artist through an archive of his life.

has a contemplative pace and a remove that is distinct from what confronts us daily. At present, so much life comes at us via handheld screens, too fast, too hard and too brutal; a constant scroll of not-good-news that produces an atmosphere of unease and threat. Peter C. Van Wyck, in his writing on nuclear war and waste, wrote that the twentieth century authored ‘unspeakable’ events that eluded our capacity for expression or description. 

 How do artists find form when the unspeakable appears to have accelerated?

 (2024), Miyu Hosoi answers the question wordlessly with sensation and sound. The video documents a journey to the Hirono Thermal Power Station in Fukushima through the disorienting perspective of an iPhone attached to the body of an unseen solo traveller. The power station, which was flooded and severely damaged by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, also supplies a good share of electricity to Tokyo, where the artist is based. 

 begins at night: through the grainy darkness, only the sound of walking on wet ground is possible to discern. The illuminated plant appears momentarily. We hear the clicking of a car indicator, lapping water, rushing air. The bewilderment of the journey dramatizes the gap between people and surrounding infrastructures, which are so often hidden, almost unimaginable. Yet the silent determination of the protagonist bridges the distance.

 (2023) similarly addresses the aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake but in a more ethereal way. The piece moves through six sequences that capture a beach, devoid of people but not entirely untouched by the human hand. Branches and pieces of driftwood have been erected vertically in the sand. This leafless forest confronts the ocean, seeming to blur the distinction between what is naturally occurring and what is not. Set in an area that was devastated by the Fukushima nuclear accident, 

 is an ephemeral monument that exudes transcendence and renewal.

In 2013 the scholar Rob Nixon coined the term ‘slow violence’ to describe the way present-day problems, particularly environmental ones, elude representation. ‘By slow violence,’ he writes, ‘I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’

Waiting (Ripon Chowdhury with Ho Tzu Nyen)

 (2020) conveys such attritional violence. It is a rare work on Covid-19, the illness and shared trauma that most people would like to forget, and whose impact was distributed so unevenly. The piece was made as a collaboration between Ho, a filmmaker, and Chowdhury, a poet and activist who was also one of the 323,000 migrant workers confined to dormitories during Singapore’s strict quarantine. We see Chowdhury documenting his confinement in mobile phone videos, which he later sent to Ho. The perspective is restless and searching as he tours the cramped living quarters, kitchen and rows of bunk beds that he shares with his fellow workers. Repeatedly he turns to the window, overlooking a road, describing his situation as ‘very helpless and completely alone … unreal’. 

 is an account of his ‘captivity’, of a quarantine that cannot be escaped or upgraded. ‘Life is at a standstill’, Chowdhury says. ‘The world has stopped to defeat an invisible enemy.’

 (2009) traces another kind of slow violence through the lost future of the DeLorean car and the mobility that the auto industry offered. Through archival footage, it details how the American dream embodied in the car deteriorated: when the company’s Detroit-based owner decided to locate its factory in Belfast, Northern Ireland, production was hobbled by Thatcher-era disinvestment, leaving a local population without the life-changing opportunities they were promised and inflaming internal tensions. Time has proved how potent that dashed hope was, and how many people still want it back. Campbell traces this desire as it settles into resentment along existing religious divisions; such feelings have, in some cases, further curdled into xenophobia and fury since the film premiered in 2009.

(2017), set in Lebanon, tells an enormous story within 50 minutes. The essayistic film alternates between close-up interviews and magnificent views of a dry and mountainous landscape, so vast that it humbles the human activity within it. The film follows three protagonists who are devoted to the care and conservation of ruins, among them Roman temples, archaeological artefacts and car parts. Just as Jarman suspended the moments between life and afterlife, here Brennan links ruin and renewal as two faces of a single epic time scale, spanning thousands of years. In a time when we are continually confronted by spectacular events that explode into contemporary consciousness and just as quickly fade away, these pieces give form and focus to the complicated consequences of their long fallout.

Notes

Biographies 

Fallout

The Drift

Make It New John

Being Blue

My Power

Erect

screening

mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

Midway in the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood, / for the straight way was lost.
– Dante Alighieri, 

It begins with a toy town alone in the woods. Its empty pagoda and closed red barn suggest the sadness of a roadside antique mall on a Tuesday morning in February. This is like Dante, too, who – 

 – comes to himself, or finds himself, or realizes himself (any of the three will do) in his 

, stricken with a melancholy consciousness, rattled, confused, like a dreamer waking into a dream and blanking the logistics. The sadness of Jonas’s town in the woods lasts no more than 20.5 seconds. Dante’s introductory sadness, nine stanzas. This, after all, is art and not life, where the sadness often feels like it will go on forever.

’ initiates the interpretive process. His grammar makes an object of himself. Dante writes, in both the

(1294), about a charming figure from Florence who is also Dante, and who, like him, is in love with a girl named Beatrice. He does this so convincingly that for centuries it became commonplace to declare that this is the poet for whom it would never be necessary to build a monumental tomb, he having in this way already entombed himself in such an enduring way. It’s an old trick of poetry that poets have learned to so freely extract ourselves from ourselves, that we confidently parse out consciousness, subject and object, mythos and bios. Jonas’s body of work draws neatly from this poetic self-splitting. In 2014, when asked by an interviewer if her work was autobiographical, Jonas confirmed: ‘No. I am absolutely against that.’

This iconic Dante whose face in all the artwork always already resembles its death mask, the poet now encrusted by hard, heavy centuries of literary authority, is absent in Jonas’s work. It is not Dante the alabastered 

-poet whom Jonas’s reading confronts. It is also not Dante’s system, with its exhausting legacy of architectural schema and cosmological speculations. Instead, Jonas’s fragments of Dante feel drawn from his poem as water drawn from the well: as necessary, and by the cupful.

Jonas’s reading is of the liquidity of Dante’s substance, which is vision and his love-struck metaphysics. Feeling itself is molten. In both works, familiar images and strange propositions slither and writhe through the matrix of time. The poet Osip Mandelstam called Dante a ‘strategist of transformation’. He proposed that any scientific examination of the 

 would ‘inevitably take the form of a treatise on metamorphosis’. Mandelstam contrasted Dante’s transformations with those of cinema, which he said possesses ‘the powers of metamorphosis of a tapeworm’ and ‘achieves a vicious parody of the instrumentality of poetic speech, since, within it, frames move without a struggle, one simply replaced by another’.

 Fair enough. But video art once was to cinema what Dante’s vernacular Italian (his 

, sweet new style) was to Latin. Both once issued the irresistible invitation of immediacy, of democracy, and the sincerity afforded by all reputedly impoverished materials. While Jonas makes use of this apparent ease of transformation, video retains its own friction: the candid, stuttering edge of video remains intact.

Dante compares his feeling in that dark wood to that of ‘one who, with labouring breath, / has escaped from the deep to the shore’ (

I.22–23). When Jonas appears in the woods as a figure in her own work, she looks less like the shipwrecked and more like a sorceress. First dressed in practical and nondescript clothing, she returns to her portal in white linen and an ethereally jagged hat, a diaphanous costume that mostly suggests an angel, doesn’t suggest a hairshirt, and only slightly suggests a shroud. Jonas is reading Dante, but she is also sweetening him, and we are reading Jonas as she reads. She gazes both into and out of her convex mirror in the woods, appearing also to be reading us.

Jonas is reading, in voiceover, a passage from 

, Canto X: a fragment which, in Dante, hurts. Farinata degli Uberti, a philosopher now caught in the circle of heretics, describes his torturous predicament: the far-sightedness of the damned. For these cursed seers, future vision exists in its contour, but the real, with its immediate, intimate and beloved textures, is out of reach. As long as time itself still exists, the present, to the heretics, will be absent. The portal will only shut on Judgement Day, which is at least an ambivalent resolution to the problem: everything will be eternity, but for the damned there will be no sight at all.

In Jonas’s dappled forest Dante’s words remain the same, but in Jonas’s reading they are now liberated from much of the 

’s agony. The passage shimmers with something nearly benevolent. We can’t see everything, but it’s okay. For a time and in this dimness, at least, we have the consolation of future vision’s light.

Dante himself had been reading Virgil, and with so much devotion that when he discovers the poet he calls ‘my teacher’ and ‘my author’ at the first canto’s terrifying junction of leopard, lion and she-wolf, he bows his head and exposes the erotic hopefulness of all readers: ‘let my long study and great love avail / that made me delve so deep into your volume’ (I.83–84). When we are reading, there is always this mix of wanting and scrying: gazing with future-longing and passionate interest into mediating stuff. This stuff can be iconic, or figural, or living, or patient and in situ, like an epic poem or a cast-off toy, for the animating – and annihilating – confrontation:

as when you drew Marsyas out from his limbs.

These lines, the next ones read by Jonas – now over the images of the blazing fire of a kiln – are nearly perverse in their rendering of inspiration’s transfigurations: ‘

sì come quando Marsia traesti / de la vagina de le membra sue

’, which is literally ‘enter into my breast and breathe there / as when you drew Marsyas from the sheath [vagina] of his limbs’.

, the poet is begging Apollo for help. This is so he can help us, in turn, see what he saw: ‘that I may show the merest shadow / of the blessed kingdom stamped within my mind’ (I.23–24).

There’s Apollo, the god who gives poets their laurels, and then there’s Apollo who, in his clandestine way, is also, or merely, a reader of poetry. The reader, each in her turn, is the one who now animates Dante’s vision. Dante, who longs for Apollo’s inspiration, and we the readers, who long for Dante’s, and Dante’s text, which longs for us, are engaged in a kind of 

 – the mingling of breaths. The mingling of breaths is also, in the Christian tradition Dante knew, the mingling of the living spirit itself.

This is why when we read poetry’s epic invocations, they are often also read 

 the reader, in an inevitable and vatic second person. The faith in a poem’s invocational ‘you’ is as much a faith in sociality as it is in the muses or gods. It is the faith that someone will be there, in the future, on the living side of the encounter, a witness to be called on directly and to feel the call. Even the flickering richness of a video dream like Jonas’s, which might as well be a poem for its lyric power, would lie dead in the dim pixels of a forgotten hard drive without its readers. It is by the ardent light of reading that we cheer up the dark solidity of objects.

It was Dante in Florence who invented, with his friends, the sweet new style. But I think a lot about the older Dante, in exile in Ravenna, aggrieved at the eating of other people’s bread, the climbing of other people’s stairs. The

 is full of the bitter relief we win in exile, and his 

, are riven with the brutality and sorrow of his own dark times. If Jonas’s 

 embraces Dante’s lyric power, it also refuses Dante’s wild anguish. No one’s eyelids are bolted shut by rusty nails. Dante’s ingenious tortures are missing, as is his sadism, as is any sense of vendetta – enemies are not made to suffer their second death in the underworld. The kiln-fires of Jonas’s second movement are somehow almost sane and reassuring, less like torturous hellfire and more like purifying forces, the ones that promise to justly test our works but leave us unburnt. As if to prove this point, Jonas, in her next scene, moves on to a world of children; desaturated, inverted, nearly wholesome, all of them are entrained together in the busy work of play, arranging the miniature buildings with a dog among them, happily helping out.

If we get any of the epic Dantean hard suffering, it is only in the video’s final act, in which the excerpt Jonas reads – one of pouring rain and howling like dogs and running from the law and writhing on hooks – is layered over an image world of frantic, zany automata. The once sweet entertainments of the children’s world – including the toy town – are undulating with fiendish power: dolls sway, puppets swing from their carousel, and no human hand is seen making these bright machines go. The toys look both innocent and out of their minds. Or at least they look more like the present’s wound-up humans than like the nightmare droids of the present’s war machines – the AI, the drones, the hope-eviscerating weaponry and systems of surveillance that behave with what sometimes feels like a diabolic vendetta against planetary life itself.

It is these toys, these cast-off automata, that come the closest to a Dantean form of inventively miserable predicament. This is because the toys, though amassed together and in action, are missing something vital. Who was it that flipped their switch, set them going? And will this maker, this animator, ever come back? In short, these toys long for God, as we might also long for God, as we might also be creepy old dolls and neon puppets in hyper-motion, playing our predictable instruments, fearing and longing for the stilling of time.

It would not be like Joan Jonas if we were left there, existentially bereft with an absconded God in an infernal toy shed. An animal appears: a blessed and smiling white dog. The dog is at ease and shows a healthy interest, is near to the camera, and its nearness suggests fidelity to a presence unseen but always close by. This dog is a gift – a punctum of mercy – reminding us of the children who were at play earlier with their own happy dog. If we are lucky or so inclined, maybe the white dog is an angel who indicates the nearness of the divine, maybe even a redemptive angel who would, like Walter Benjamin’s, ‘stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’.

 If the dog in the toy-scape is not a divine being, it is at least a testimonial one, reminding us of something beyond what feels, in our present, like hell. ‘What’s outside we only know from the animal’, as Rilke says, adding: ‘

Und wo wir Zukunft sehn, dort sieht es Alles

’ – ‘where we see Future, it sees All’.

Biographies

The Far Sightedness of the Damned: On Future Lot: Reading Dante

Future Lot: Reading Dante

The Far-sightedness of the Damned:  On Future Lot: Reading Dante

假作真時真亦假,
無為有處有還無。

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true
Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real

—Cao Xueqin, 紅樓夢/ 

Do you remember that day up on stage? Your left hand in mine, your right clapped over your mouth. The world, it spun, but when I turned to you, I saw it all clearly. Crystals at the tips of your nails. The gape of your mouth, widening in the spotlight. Sobbing, but your bangs still disconcertingly intact. Hairspray gloss. The shock. Coloured contacts dilating your eyes, wide and round and green. Mirroring the audience. Their cooing. Screaming. Your wrist waving limply. This happens. Season after season of reality shows to assemble the cutest girl group, the most alluring boy idols.

A story like this, to be feasible, has to come to an end. The camera pans. We made it. Across the stage, a mid shot of other eliminated contestants, folding to the floor in distress. I shut the browser. YouTube ad, stifled. The glare of my bedroom lamp against the laptop screen. My legs. Scraping the softness of the duvet. Worn soft by leisure. Watching 

, which is a 2024 survival reality competition created by Mnet in collaboration with Teddy Park’s The Black Label. A cast of adolescent BLACKPINK hopefuls. Stern but loving mentors, stalwarts in the K-pop industry. Only six spots in the group. Not everyone gets to debut. Not everyone gets to have a promising career as an artist. But some do.

The theatre of reality TV is founded in formula. Part of a long tradition of melodrama, after all – composed of tropes and patterns that in their arbitrary combination and recombination are engineered to automatically provoke an emotional response within me. Even, or perhaps especially, when exaggerated or absurd. So I cry. I am not on stage, pining for a glittering future. I am not a contestant in a survival programme. Not even a teenage girl, not anymore. I get up and trip over my disgruntled cat, trying to brush the crumbs from my sheets.

But your nails in my palm. I still feel them. I raise my hand to brush confetti from my cheek. ‘It’s different, isn’t it,’ you say, trembling. On the brink of a dream come true. ‘It’s different now that it’s real.’

I swoon. Weak for it. I can’t resist falling head first into its obliterating embrace. 

The artist and filmmaker Tao Hui would understand, known as he is for mobilizations of sentimentality, in which he appropriates and intervenes into cross-temporal mediums of melodrama, from nostalgic C-drama to TikTok, live streams to classical Chinese texts. Inhabiting a Tao Hui piece is to subject oneself to involuntarily gripping constructions of intimacy while hyperaware of being dangled on the fishhook of mass media.

, a group of actors are tasked with re-performing emotionally charged scenes from Chinese television, culled from programmes ranging from reality TV to C-drama to news features. The original version of said programme plays soundlessly in the background – on a monitor or screen, sometimes projected into another section of the frame. Because of the omnipresence of media in our lives, this doesn’t feel remarkable. The flat screen running a drama on mute above the counter of a boba shop. A movie set up for projection in the park. Still, watching along is a little akin to materializing the disorienting feeling of having subtitles out of sync – especially since the spoken dialogue between the actors in the foreground often precedes the soundless moving of the characters’ lips behind them. Until a dramatic breath or unintended stumble in the actors’ delivery means the TV version once again takes the lead. Until a burst of speed in an actress’s impassioned monologue means her counterpart, mouth a stuttering goldfish-O, begins to lag. No temporal consistency. These actors’ re-embodiment of an extant visual script that yet continues to play unevenly alongside them produces a chaotic, unstable interplay between image and body, avatar and sound. What’s realer? It seems that Tao Hui is ambivalent. Indeed, he stipulates there be no set order to how these scenes are curated or viewed; rather, they can be scrambled, so long as each scene is played only once within the sequence. Without a clear sense of origin, what Tao creates is a cinematic topology in which there is no hierarchy or boundary between reality and fantasy, living and acting. Rather, all these layers, reinforcing and contradicting one another within an edgelessly mutable affective field.

One might assume that these amalgamated displacements would alienate the viewer from the emotional heart of each interaction. Coolly extract the charge from each scenario. And yet, watching 

, I still can’t help but cry. I cry even though I am not the woman on her knees in the restaging of the 

, sobbing for the forgiveness of her parents. All three of them devastated by the way she’s let her wayward lover mistreat her. I am not the athlete facing down the press to account for a serious injury right before the Rio Olympics. But Agustín Zarzosa writes that melodrama’s formally sublimated hysterics – its high artifice, the rigid symbolism of cinema – afford the viewer some relative safety and distance in order to unconsciously access their secret selves. I am not an actor, but when I watch Tao’s prismatic facsimiles of people experiencing the kinds of contradictory feelings that coincidentally collide with my own, perhaps I am, as Zarzosa writes, not watching them so much as ‘finding [aesthetic] pleasure in the private observation of [my] own suffering’.

Strikingly, even when the quivering mouths on the TV screen and the voices of the actors in the foreground barely ever sync up, their gestures always do. A slap to the face of a cheating lover. A hand on the heart, appealing to a yearned-after crush. A forehead dropping down into a set of proffered hands. This punctuating physicality always perfectly timed, as if to drive home the fact that, within the fluctuating currents of 

, no matter where and to whom emotions are occurring – love, filial piety, pain – they are undyingly, unquestionably true.

So I cry. Because I might not be the aspiring pop star in the reality singing programme 

, honouring the sacrifices her mother has made to raise her into the talented young woman she is today. I am not the actress playing her, either, thanking not an audience of hundreds but a few empty chairs in a community auditorium. But I can’t help it. Watching both women sing through their tears, I cry. A childhood photo of the aspiring pop star crawls up the background. Her mother then, young and beautiful, arms wrapped around her tiny form. Gap-toothed, pink headband. Her mother now, fond and weary-faced, clapping for her in the crowd, bathed in pink stadium lights. Because these are insert shots, they look like artificial memories being hallucinated by the ‘real’ actress standing in front of the screen. The overlay of what could be and what is, a dream fulfilled and a dream emergent, compounding the strength of my own feeling. Mama loves her so much. She’d do anything in her power to make things possible for her. She cries; I cry because deep down, I know that these memories, they belong to me.

So what? Seductive as it is, intense emotion, especially when isolated to the locus of an individual subjectivity, is never inherently subversive. Indeed, in 

, there is an aspirational, didactic undercurrent to its melodramatic narratives that feels as discomfiting as it is sentimentally urgent. Indeed, formulations of love and deep feeling here are not solely relegated to the province of romance but extend to social ideals and concerns that border on the propagandistic. A child from the ‘Heart to Heart’ Art Troupe speaks about his deep love and gratitude for the elders throughout the country (his ‘aunts, uncles, grandmas and grandpas’) who have supported him as a victim of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. A film star, Ko Chen-tung, embroiled in a marijuana scandal laments how he has betrayed the love and concern of his fans. Above him, a popular children’s cartoon hovers on a screen, as if indicating to the viewer that this is a lesson to learn. He is a cautionary tale.

Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China

, he describes how China’s late 1970s transition into global neoliberalism meant it was in the state’s interest for Chinese subjects to reframe their idealized notions of love. Rather than the previous state-sanctioned ‘revolutionary romanticism’, in which citizens’ individual interests were subordinated to the government’s socialist cause, the administration encouraged subjects to cultivate ‘agential selves motivated to seek familial opulence and prosperity in market competition’.

 Zhang raises the example of the popular dating show 

, in which young professionals go through a series of challenges to help them find a perfect spouse. Meant to enable these young men and women to become romantically and emotionally fulfilled, the series instead uses the spectacle of mass media to align the characteristics and qualities of an ideal partner with ‘private property ownership, upward mobility, and endurable heteronormative intimacy’.

It is through the reproducible quality of melodrama that 

 reveals to us, as Zhang describes, how state forces can become insidiously woven into the affective apparatus of love, shaping its viewers’ desires and aspirations so these better align with the needs of the neoliberal state. We get the sense that the actors are interpellated by or seem to be unconsciously modelling what the original TV programmes are espousing – whether in the way of hard-earned success, heterosexual romance or reproductive futurism. This is compounded by the fact that the actors participating in the re-enactment of scenes often seem more like ‘regular’ citizens, ripe and ready for instruction. Dressed casually and not shrouded by the aura of hair and makeup, nor glamorized by costume or style, they could be students or retirees or office workers. They occupy settings that appear to be public spaces of quotidian life and learning – community centres, school auditoriums, classrooms, coffee shops, parks.

Still, there is an aura of the ill-fitting, a gawkiness of the emergent that permeates 

 and suggests that its actors’ re-embodiments in fact fail to fit into their idealized templates. That they can’t live up to the unattainable standards of their originals. Indeed, even though the actors often speak first and occupy the foreground of the shot, the highly produced nature of television – its artful editing of close-ups and wide-angles, its colour correction and audience shots – means that the viewer’s eye is often drawn towards the original TV programme playing in the background. What is manufactured appears strangely more naturalistic. In contrast, the actors’ exchanges, filmed as a single mid shot, appear static, stilted. The incongruence of their soap-opera dramatics jammed into a banal setting. Their theatrical language highlighted by the plainness of the frame.

Sometimes, the re-enactments feel more like crude imitations, involving inferior props or markers that seem to suggest the actors inhabit different social or class positions than their televised counterparts. Meaning there is a sense of the surreal, the absurd to these inconsistencies. For example, in the re-enactment of a scene from the classic 1994 C-drama romance 

Akeroyd Collection

Artists