Lynette Qiuyang Shen 沈秋阳
Abstract
This paper examines how bad images – characterised by poor quality and often produced by obsolete media, low-tech equipment, or machinery malfunction – serve as critical aesthetic devices in Chinese diasporic films and videos. Moving beyond discourses on media obsolescence as a systemic condition of technological capitalism, this paper reveals how substandard images and obsolete media are reclaimed as diasporic visual practices shaped by the political economy of images within specific sociopolitical conditions. Bridging cinema and media studies with art history, this paper focuses on two experimental films by women filmmakers originally from mainland China and now residing in the U.S.: Yin Chi-Jang’s 殷子静Another Clapping (2001) and Ouyang Peixuan’s 欧阳霈萱The____World (2021). While they each address their diasporic realities at distinct historical junctures, with Yin making films in the post-Cultural Revolution era and Ouyang during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper demonstrates that they both mobilise bad images to disrupt notions of ‘origin’ and ‘authenticity’, which are ideologically and affectively coded in diasporic discourses and entangled with the vexed concepts of ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness’. The blurry, glitchy, and faulty images in their works do not signify a lack in diasporic displacement from an authentic origin. Instead, they re-enchant the digital surface, transforming it into a critical space where diasporic women interrogate these notions in their ideological, racialised, and gendered framings. Ultimately, this paper argues that the creative reclamation of bad images cultivates emergent modes of diasporic belonging and intimacy, rooted in a radical rejection of the prescribed terms of authenticity and Chineseness.