| film: Ten Thousand Waves
| director: Isaac Julien
| composer: Zen Lu + Grzegorz Bojanek
| exhibition: 8th Shanghai Biennale (2010)

Ten Thousand Waves, Isaac Julien’s latest work, was conceived through several years of dialogue and collaboration with artists, musicians, writers, academics and journalists in China and the UK. Continuing in this spirit of cross-discipline and trans-border collaboration, the director envisages two further rearticulations of the work through translation into a live performance and exhibition.

The live performance would rework the nine-screen installation into a newly edited single screen form, pushing the sonic element of the performance to the forefront. In this hybrid space of gallery, cinema and concert hall, acclaimed musicians CHoP would negotiate the film’s dense network of ideas, moods and tones through a 50 minute improvised piece. This unique collaboration would serve to reconfigure the existing hierarchy of image and sound, whereby works of music are most often interpolated into works of film, with a convincing argument for a relation of mutual dependence between the two mediums. The improvisational nature of the performance would also elaborate on a theme of the director’s move into nine-screen projection, by reintroducing the element chance into the transmission of film. Just as no two viewings of Ten Thousand Waves in it’s nine-screen format would be alike, allowing multiple interpretations, every performance of the work by the musicians would be different.

In support of this live performance of Ten Thousand Waves, would be an additional rendering in the form of an exhibition. The exhibition would act as a record of the varied creative and meditative processes behind the creation of the work. Also using a soundtrack from FM3 or CHoP, the exhibition would recontextualise materials related to the research and development of Ten Thousand Waves, from the original ‘Tale of Yishan Island’ to Wang Ping’s Small Boats poem. The exhibition would also signify the initial realisation of a larger project planned by Julien in which his new work engages with and directly utilises his own archive.

Musicians:

ChoP was formed in September 2006 when Chinese sound artist Zen Lu began collaborating with Polish experimental musician Grzegorz Bojanek. With a background in experimental electronica and industrial noise, ChoP’s current sound is best described as ‘dark ambient’. Positioned somewhere between a music and an art project, the duo have come to play in both exhibition spaces and concert halls. Their method of composition itself, exchanging samples across the internet between Poland and China, recalls the topoi of Ten Thousand Waves: collaboration and the crossing of boundaries.