Who’s Afraid of China?

About the Films

Sunday in Peking

Chris Marker, 1956, France, 22 min

Filmed during Marker’s brief visit to Beijing in the mid-1950s, Sunday in Peking offers a lyrical portrait of the city through observations of streets, architecture, labor, and everyday life. Rather than presenting a conventional documentary, the film unfolds as a reflective visual essay, assembling impressions of a society undergoing rapid transformation.

Sans Soleil

Chris Marker, 1982, France, 100 min

Widely regarded as one of the most influential essay films ever made, Sans Soleil moves between Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco through a series of letters read by a female narrator. Blending travel footage, philosophical reflection, and meditations on memory, the film examines how images circulate, persist, and transform the ways we understand history and experience.

RSVP

Dates: March 28–29, 2026

Time: 2:00 PM

Location: Liu Shiming Art Gallery

15 E 40th Street, 5th Floor

New York, NY 10016

Post-screening conversation: March 29 with Hindley Wang

Curated by Chirui Cheng

Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) unfolds over a single evening as long-suppressed tensions slowly emerge. Two couples talk late into the night, gradually dismantling the stories they have built about their marriages, ambitions, and lives. At the center of the play is an invented son imagined by George and Martha, sustained over many years as a private fiction shared between them. The imaginary child becomes a vessel onto which they project disappointment, aging, professional stagnation, and the erosion of intimacy. The fiction allows them to displace the emotional weight of a life that has not unfolded as they hoped. Without it, the fragile coherence of their lives would collapse. The imagined son shields them from confronting what Lacan calls the Real — the dimension of experience that resists the fictions through which life becomes livable.

Visual media can perform a similar operation. Photography and cinema often generate images through which a place, a culture, or a history becomes emotionally legible. If Albee’s play invents a son to stabilize a collapsing life, visual culture can similarly construct a nation as an aesthetic object.

Chris Marker’s Sunday in Peking (1956) assembles impressions of Maoist Beijing into a contemplative montage. Architecture, streets, workers, and young people moving through everyday life. Narrative recedes, and memory becomes the organizing principle. The city appears luminous and rhythmic, attentive to the textures of ordinary presence. Time folds into atmosphere. Complexity settles into perceptual clarity, forming images that can be revisited, circulated, and shared.

Yet the structural weight of history remains outside the frame. Political rupture, material scarcity, and the profound social transformations reshaping Maoist China persist beyond the camera’s gaze—present as historical reality, yet absent from the image. What emerges instead is a city rendered perceptible through atmosphere and rhythm: an image of China that can be observed, remembered, and emotionally inhabited.

A different image of China emerges in "Beijing Silvermine." The photographs in this archive were originally taken by anonymous families between the 1980s and early 2000s. Amateur portraits. Couples posing beside rivers. Public sculptures used as backdrops. Children sharing soft drinks. Random scenes of aspirational family life.

Originally produced without artistic ambition, many of these negatives were later abandoned and eventually recovered by French artist Thomas Sauvin from recycling depots on the outskirts of Beijing. Through preservation, resequencing, and exhibition, these photographs entered a new narrative shaped by curatorial selection. Within the white cube, fragments of everyday life become legible as a coherent visual history.

A vast and turbulent period of social transformation condenses into a recognizable visual narrative. The country that emerges appears continuous, intimate, and emotionally graspable. In dialogue with Liu Shiming’s sculptures, works that themselves evoke an idealized image of rural and urban life, these photographs contribute to a visual field in which “China” appears culturally unified and historically coherent.

In Archives, the photographs of “Beijing Silvermine” appear as an exhibition, while Chris Marker’s Sunday in Peking (1956) is presented as a screening in the same space. Though formally distinct, the archive and the film begin to operate within the same structure of viewing. In both works, dispersed historical fragments are arranged into sequences that feel continuous, intimate, and shareable, while conflict and instability recede from view. “Chinese-ness” becomes available as an object of aesthetic intimacy: something that can be seen, felt, and contained within the frame. Viewers are invited to attach feeling to the image through projection, sequence, and atmosphere. In Lacanian terms, this is the work of the Imaginary: coherence is produced through the image. What exceeds the image — contradiction, rupture, the abrasiveness of lived history — is softened into visual signs: sunlight, gesture, domestic presence. The twentieth-century China therefore appears inhabitable. What emerges is something like the invented son: a stabilizing fiction through which historical reality becomes emotionally bearable.

Yet something remains outside this visual order: the lived experience of those who moved through these histories without being fully represented by them. Behind the upward momentum of the 1950s and the optimistic sheen of the 1990s lie tensions between city and countryside, structural upheaval, unemployment under reform, collective trauma, and ideological disillusionment. Such conditions rarely survive vernacular photography or poetic travel cinema. They resist aesthetic consolidation. Within the visual fiction that organizes “China” into warmth and coherence, other histories recede, not because they did not exist but because they cannot be easily absorbed into the same stabilizing image. They remain unevenly preserved in lived memory, carried by those who lived them, but only partially recoverable within the visual languages of nostalgia and display.

Contemporary forms of Orientalism no longer rely solely on framing China as static or underdeveloped. Its forms have become more atmospheric and affective. Photography and cinema can turn distance into desire through the faded negative, the amber-tinted reel, and the softness of archival glow. Within these tonal registers, “Chinese-ness” settles into a gently curated sensibility. The question therefore returns: Who organizes memory? Who selects the images that stand in for a century? Who occupies the position of narrator when a culture becomes archive? Who is seen, and from where? To watch these images with such questions in mind is to reintroduce contingency into what appears coherent. It is to perceive uncertainty beneath warmth. The point is not to dispel fiction altogether, but to recognize the comfort it provides and the histories it leaves behind. In that sense, the figure behind the title returns once more: not as something to fear, but as a reminder that every bearable image is also a construction.

The screening concludes with Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982). Moving across Japan, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, San Francisco, and France, the film traces a dispersed cartography of memory. It opens with a meditation on time and space from T. S. Eliot, a refrain that quietly shadows the work throughout. Marker moves through these images like a witness to the afterlives of historical catastrophe, attentive to fragments that appear useless and yet remain precious: anonymous faces, flickering television images, stray cats, ritual gestures, and the quiet persistence of ruins.

—- Chirui Cheng