At the intersection of media, politics, and feminism, the legacy that female artists have left in the application of visual language and new technologies and the expansion of video’s political potential is unprecedented, thereby laying a solid foundation for the development of video art. The experimental field of video art is further broadened by artists who delve into realities from diverse global regions and explore complexities of identity within specific communities. This article focuses on the contemporary video practices of Chinese female artists across multiple generations. Ellen Pau, Shu Lea Cheang, and Angela Su engage in queer political video practices, testing the potential of bodily perception, and pushing the boundaries of video performance. Cao Fei directs our attention toward marginalized communities and constructs utopias in the process. Kan Xuan, Hao Jingban, and Liu Shiyuan observe and question the fluid relationships between the individual and the contemporary state of civilization. Yao Qingmei employs the lens as an instrument for public intervention. Their work continues video art’s commitment to alternative expression and navigating a complex world, since its emergence in the 1960s, while also incorporating a wider range of issues for experimentation. Through in-depth examinations of topics encompassing gender, technology, history, and heritage, they challenge the prevailing power structures and their nuanced complexities from every angle.

Contemporary experimental video art extensively explores the interplay between the personal and political, the public and private. It bridges the high culture and mundane life, forging connections between the present moment and disparate times and spaces. Ellen Pau, a self-taught artist from Hong Kong, has played a significant role in shaping the trajectory of video art in the region. In 1986, she co-founded Videotage alongside her peers, curating screenings and building associations between video and technology. Her work Recycling Cinema, presented at the 2001 Venice Biennale, integrates video technology with electronic noise. It documents the flow of vehicles along the highways of Hong Kong over 24 hours. Through static frames, it captured the ever-changing cityscape, creating an immersive experience that transcends the conventional temporal and spatial relations.

Pau’s continuous focus on LGBTQ issues in her videos is noteworthy. In the recent exhibition “Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III” at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, Pau’s work took center stage as both the opening and closing pieces. Notably, Song of the Goddess (1992) stands as a poignant tribute to a modern history of queer love. Virtual imagery weaves together scenes of mid-20th century Cantonese opera stars Yam Kim-fai and Pak Suet-sin. Their love stories on stage and on screen (with Yam Kim-fai in a male role) extended into their real lives, culminating in a heartwarming tale of lifelong companionship. Her new work 52Hz (2022) that concludes the exhibition likewise pays homage to two women. They were two Hong Kong students who tragically took their lives after their romantic relationship was discovered. The artist’s three-decade-long dedication to the LGBTQ+ community sheds light on its history in Asia and underscores the importance of inclusivity within exhibitions.

3×3×6, another work featured in the exhibition “Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III” was created by the Chinese-American artist Shu Lea Cheang. It was first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Cheang interlaces scenes from ten fictional sci-fi punk works, recounting instances from history where non-binary gender concepts and gender-racial disorders led to imprisonment and punishment. The stories of Foucault, Casanova, and the Marquis de Sade are all interpreted through a queer lens. 3×3×6 melds graphics, computer programming, and the analog and virtual realms. The visual effects are generated by algorithms that blend various image sources, including photos of exhibition visitors (with their consent), to craft abstract anti-surveillance digital visuals that address gender and racial inclusivity. The audience are invited to envision a world devoid of physical incarceration and mental constraints, and to redefine our relationship with surveillance.

Freedom, sanctions, restrictions, and liberation have been the enduring themes Cheang has explored in her boundary-pushing practice over the past thirty years. Since 1982, she has been a member of the alternative media collective, Paper Tiger Television. Her film Fresh Kill (1994) is a family story that intertwines surrealistic narrative, grappling with issues such as LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalism, and political intervention. This film introduced the term “hacktivist” for the first time, and had a significant impact on the hacker subculture. She co-founded the Kingdom of Piracy in 2001 with friends to provide an online platform for sharing digital content and conceptual art. Cheang expanded the discussions on cyberfeminism, queer identity, and social justice, through her profoundly disruptive works and unwavering care for the communities.

The young Hong Kong artist Angela Su delves into a variety of subjects such as technological perception, medical science, and body politics. Her works infuse traditional analog video materials with vibrant recollections. Her recent piece Lacrima (2022) similarly explores the transcendent potential of visual storytelling. She creates a montage of footage featuring figures such as magician and filmmaker Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, conductors Hans Richter, filmmaker Luis Buñuel, filmmaker and choreographer Busby Berkeley, and herself embodying the early 20th-century psychic Nina Palladino. Amidst the surreal dream of headless ghosts, misty gases, and ghostly codes, the artist invites the viewers to take a leap of faith into the fourth dimension she constructs. Su’s visual prose and pseudo-documentaries interweave digital and virtual footage, science and alchemy, image and magic. She crafts a thrillingly fresh narrative vision by examining the divergent paths of modern technological development between the East and West, recounting tales of frenzy, and casting spotlights on uncompromising individuals in history.

In the context of mainland China, the term “suspension” encapsulates a prevalent state of existence and the fluidity of identity. It represents the constant tension between individual destinies, the rapid evolution of contemporary Chinese society, and the enduring legacy of China’s history. Over the past two decades since 2000, Cao Fei’s rich and intricate visual imagery has captured the swift development of contemporary China. Juxtaposing the language of documentary and hyper-realism, she assembles fragments of reality. The early collaborative piece San Yuan Li (2003), draws attention to the modern urban architecture and the village-amidst-the-city. RMB City (2007) vividly depicts contemporary Chinese new towns, rife with contradictions, integrations, satire, doubt, and extreme forms of entertainment. In La Town (2014), mini-figures and plastic constructions inhabit a dystopian cityscape. Cao not only showcases the adjustments and efforts undertaken by individuals amidst China’s rapid societal transformations, but also bestows the rights of expression upon the nameless. Whose Utopia (2006), commissioned by the Siemens Arts Program, is a quintennial representation of her practice, wherein we see workers in an ordinary factory dance and perform the roles of their dreams.

At her retrospective exhibition “Cao Fei: Staging the Era” at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in 2021, Cao showed her long-term interdisciplinary project Hongxia. Its focal point is the Hongxia Cinema, a nearly forgotten cultural relic from the socialist era. Originally a workers’ canteen, it was converted into the Hongxia Cinema in the early 1960s, and later used by Cao as her studio. It was recreated in the exhibition through multi-layered media installations. Cao has collected a wealth of photographs, archival documents, historical objects, and news clippings pertaining to this space. She also shot a science fiction film Nova (2019) here. The film narrates the tale of a scientist's failed research and the same fate it bears across different times and spaces. The movie constructs a visual realm where Soviet science fiction aesthetics, socialist environments, and the online world converge, penetrating and influencing one another. It also serves as an archive chronicling the historical changes of the Jiuxianqiao neighborhood in Beijing, the central base for China’s early electronic industry.

Hao Jingban, through her videos, rewrote and reenacted intricate historical narratives in the style of performative anthropology. Her long-term research investigates themes such as China’s film history, Manchukuo’s film history, and the history of ballroom dance in China. Via the interplay of the dancing bodies, film characters, and cultural networks, history and culture recur, gradually leading to a process of self-correction. In her recent piece Opus One (2020), Hao traces how two dance partners contemplated the history of African-American swing dance and interpreted the styles of legendary figures. They traveled to Harlem in New York City in 2019, the birthplace of swing dance. Their visit coincided with the funeral of Norma Miller, known as the “Queen of Swing”. In this neighborhood that played a pivotal role in shaping dance and modern cultural history, they encountered the fading of former glory, obstacles in communication, and the warmth shared among people. Returning to the historical scene, regardless of their racial background, is now impossible. However, culture, community, and heritage exert a subtle, ambiguous, and non-linear influence on the individual. History is malleable in Hao’s works, offering sustenance to those come from the future.

For Kan Xuan, “history does not only concern the past, nor is it just academic, but is also an extension of emotions”. Her works often originate from individual experiences, diving into the entangled relationship between objective existence and subjective feelings. Millet Mounds (2012), which was selected for the 2013 Venice Biennale, marks a turning point in her practice. It consists of 173 stop-motion videos, documenting the artist’s journey with her friends to the 171 excavated imperial tombs in China and the surrounding landscapes, covering a staggering 28,000 kilometers. In these stop-motion sequences composed from roughly four to five hundred cellphone pictures, all these locations that once embodied the imperial history and the constructed grand narratives gradually dissolve and distort. Kan’s editing imbued the video with rich and nuanced emotions. The ruins, already embedded in the sandy soil, underwent a transformation into landscapes, evoking the blurred boundaries between natural elements and human society.

Liu Shiyuan’s image-based multimedia works offer a whimsical misinterpretation of individuals’ relationships with diverse historical eras and present situations. Her multicultural life experience fosters a profound concern for ethical matters on a global scale, as well as the ever-changing intrusion of technology into private space. Originating from the notion that “all films appropriate one another”, Lost in Export (2013) explores how the evolution of cinema has produced a plethora of technical tools and frameworks, ultimately defining people’s perception and imagination of reality. Sections from the scripts of movies such as In the Mood for Love, The Beach, and Lost in Translation are modified and shot anew. The re-arranged sequences form a new narrative that is both coherent and somewhat disjointed. This alternative documentary about film not only scrutinizes the construction of cinematic discourse, but also suggests the infiltration of images onto various screens in contemporary life.

Video has always served as a crucial tool for performance artists to record their physical exertions and ritualistic acts. For example, Tong Wenmin’s latest series of performance videos, From South to North (2022 to present), documents the artist’s direct observation of the effects of wild plants and her process of illustrating them. The participatory nature of the camera also grants it the ability to intervene in and examine the public domain. Yao Qingmei’s The Burrow series (2021), which took two years to complete, continues her focus on “everyday community performance”. As if a documentary video, it shows sequences of staff on duty in the control room, security guards rehearsing under repeated commands, and tourists appearing, moving, and passing by on the beach one after another. The screens of the installation recall those found in an underground control room, which extends their reach to every corner. They establish rules and allocate roles, sustaining the flow of visual information, ultimately confusing the performance and real-time.

Stuart Comer, the Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) remarked on the recent exhibition “Signals: How Video Transformed the World”, “While video is now a pervasive and defining aspect of contemporary life, it is an unruly and elusive artform that has created institutional challenges since its inception.” Video art has always wielded a distinctive influence on participatory democracy, identity politics, and technological awareness. The convergence of the real and virtual worlds in artists’ creations also illuminates how the development of media, characterized by global, critical, and radical attributes, and contemporary history reciprocally shape each other. Compared to artists of the 1960s who integrated self-referential imagery into their works as a form of rebellion, protest, satire, and self-expression, today’s video art has fully evolved into a transformative media network that disrupts our world. It serves as a testament, a platform for performance and protest, a vehicle for fables, and a form of ethnography, documenting conflicts both online and offline in contested areas, and witnessing the ebbs and flows of history and social movements. Moreover, video stands at the forefront of resistance against the continuous encroachment of systematic control, where issues like immediacy, circulation, and expression become entangled. (Translated by Zhao Wenrui)