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2024, 20min, short film
Work in progress Directed, written and produced by Zheng Ningyuan Dop: Luo Li Cameraman: Zhou Kaixuan Starring: Gabriele Montani, Gainandrea Esposito, Roberta Braga, Cheng Mengge, Zhang Qi, Dakou Zhang, Gabriele, Xie Pu, Liao Yingze Costume: Hao Zhuang Line-producer: Cao Sanle |
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(WUXU - Prato Project)
2021-2023, 41min, documentary Workshop during Festival Seta at Prato, Italy artistic book We all carry stories carved in our hearts: stories that leave their mark, in which we can recognize ourselves, and yet are difficult to tell. Melodies and sounds sometimes ignite fragments of memory capable of assigning extraordinary meanings to ordinary places. Our intention is to reconstruct stories through memories and emotions, scents and flavours, within a public space where we can tell our past in a confidential manner. Together with the participants, we will walk the streets most experienced by the citizens of Sinoprat, discovering the places most connected to their lives and work. On our way we will meet some people of Chinese origin who will tell their stories, their version of the 'parallel city'. They will do this starting from memory: personal fragments related to their own migration experience that will find a public dimension for the first time. This journey is like a list of songs in a stereo, we will 'play' with our steps the city of Prato and its stories. Artists: Jin Fansong, filmmaker Wang Yihan, visual artist Zheng Ningyuan, visual artist Film director/producer, book editor Zheng Ningyuan Special starring in film: Luo Li Narrator: Felicia Jin Qin Huang Simona Hong |
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RETRO-IDLENISM2022, performance, installation
Tecnocene curated by Into the Blackbox collective and Bianca Cavuti DAMSlab, Bologna, Italy We created this project as part of our research with into the blackbox platform Capitalist Critique. We imagined a kind of "nostalgia" from the future to the past, a way of looking at the present through the eyes of the future. Juxtaposing the landscape of the video game paly to earn, the cryptocurrency, the workers of the gig economy, and creating a state where the takeaway is left idle by the system. This new urban landscape can be a potential energy of resistance and thus explores the contemporary identity of the working classe. |
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MANDAR(IN)(work in progress)
2021, documentary, research project interview The project is based on Bologna, one of the earliest cities for Chinese immigrants in Italy, and on the city as a microcosm of international geopolitics from the 1930s to the present day. On the one hand, the project aims at organising a narrative of the history of the Chinese in the city in different historical periods with different identities; on the other hand, it wants to explore the relationship between international social change and the shaping of immigrant identity. The central thread remains a series of portraits of Chinese faces, their emotions in the midst of complex changes. |
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ADDIO AI MONTI(Farewell to the mountains - work in progress)
2022, short film, 12 min An immigrant leaves one of the stops on his journey. The 18th-century villa and the strange objects represent a foreign land. The protagonist looks at the mountain next to Lake Como and tells of his longing for home and love. It is as if that mountain were his homeland. The story is inspired by the novel Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed). The work was created as part of the exhibition A/Essenze at Villa Carlotta curated by Fulvio Chimento. |
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2021, a two-channels video (in Chinese/Urdu/Italian), 3 single-channel video, color video, 30min, textile objects
artist-in-residence financed by Zucchelli Foundation, curated by Alchemilla From 10 January 2021, the spaces of Alchemilla will host Zheng Ningyuan in residence as part of the "Residenza-studio" project. Zheng Ningyuan's research takes shape around a survey carried out on the working conditions of Chinese immigrants in some Italian regions, focusing on those areas that show a high presence of illegal labour in the manufacturing industry. In addition, the artist focuses on some dramatic news events, which have aroused little interest in Italian public opinion, but have had a strong impact on the Chinese community in Tuscany. Zheng Ningyuan's aim is to analyse the 'behaviour' of global capitalism in a broad sense, focusing his interest on the ways in which social conflicts manifest themselves in the peripheral areas of the planet. It all began with a black news episode, a fire that caused the death of 7 Chinese workers in a textile factory in Prato (Teresa Moda) in 2013. An event that highlighted the cracks in world capitalism that relentlessly claims lives every year.The artist, together with the WUXU collective of which he is a member, wanted to bring to light the hidden truths and for many years have been researching. The first research phase of the project began with the documentation of the strike of Pakistani workers against exploitation inside a Chinese factory. The strike was organised by the basic trade union SI Cobas. The artist starts with themes of personal narrative, labour law, geopolitics and the art system. The result of the residency consists of a 30-minute, two-channel video art work: starting from the author's narrative, the Min River in Fujian, China, the Chenab River in Punjab, Pakistan, and the Bisenzio River in Prato, Italy, are used as clues; the second part describes the strike through the use of textiles, while the last part consists of a series of interviews with Chinese and Pakistani workers. (Alchemilla) |
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(WUXU - Prato Project)
2019- ，interdisciplinary research program The Prato Project aims to create a collaborative platform to foster communication between academic studies and the art that is intended to implement also with an interdisciplinary laboratory in the Prato’s context and beyond. The reasons why we believe it is worthwhile to start and invest in the Prato Project are related to different issues that we perceive to be of fundamental importance - both locally and globally. In particular, migratory movements and refugee politics, cultural integration and the rethinking of the industrial textile core are among the central issues of the context of today's Prato; as a result this territory with “double yarn” is closely linked to the general global changes. We are convinced that in the Prato area there is still a need for a space in the local communities for a "social intervention" and, at the same time, there is a lack on the part of the state organs in keeping up with the academic narratives on the theme of migration and to elaborate policies aimed at better coexistence. We believe that the practice of artistic practice can, in this case, compensate for some of these shortcomings and could produce a new language. In this sense, WUXU wants to organise the works in the form of a "container" and offer multidisciplinary tools for the purpose of research and cultural practice. The platform is designed to produce different "spaces" during the development of the project. These spaces can be physical: meetings, workshops, field research, exhibitions, public art, etc. But at the same time they can also be virtual spaces: archives, editorial productions, multilingual communication channels, development of online programs, etc. |
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(WUXU - Prato Project)
2020-2021 Workshop on 10 October 2020 during Seta Festival in Prato, Italy, Video production in 2021, in collaboration with Liceo Cicognini Cristina reached Prato one day in June. A homeless person, not much was known about her, only that she was coming from Padua. From the 'mystery of Cristina', as the newspapers wrote, to the difficulties of communication with the Chinese community, the epidemic has further complicated our life trajectories, forcing us to confront absence: absence of individual stories, absence of communication between people, absence of inhabitants in the city. Prato represents for many Chinese citizens the place understood as 'home', where a mixed and heterogeneous community is confused and lost in the industrial, commercial and residential areas. Perhaps for Cristina, Prato was also home for a moment. In this activity, the WUXU association and the participants will walk together along the streets most experienced by the citizens of Sinopratesi, discovering the places most closely linked to their lives. This "pilgrimage" will allow the group to revitalise fading energies, re-examine the spaces between people and confront their absence. Before returning to the Red Zone in Italy, we had the opportunity to do a workshop in Prato with the students of the Cicognini High School: the search for the missing homeless girl Cristina. After the workshop, we turned it into a complete videoart work. Five artists and researchers: Ding Yujie, Jin Fansong, Wu Di, Wang Yihan, Zheng Ningyuan |
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CINESI IN ITALIA2021, feature film, documentary, 90min
co-directed with Susanna Yu Bai As part of the University of Turin's Researchers' Night 2020, the Confucius Institute presents the documentary "Cinesi in Italia", a reconnaissance work on the Chinese presence in our country, carried out through recent interviews collected in Turin, Milan, Florence, Prato, Rome, Naples, Bologna and Trieste. The work aims to be a contribution to a better knowledge of the diversified, active and often socially aware presence of the Chinese in our country. The documentary investigates the younger generations with particular attention, without losing sight of the stratification of the different experiences since the 1980s. |
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(WUXU project)
2021, documentary, 40min, produced in Italy and Canada The documentary titled “Racism is the Virus” —which received the 2021 Canada-Italy Innovation Award and was part of a larger project titled “Vulnerability and Care During Covid-19-Induced Anti-Asian Racism and Violence in Italy and Canada” (VulCa2021)—was carried out by a team of interdisciplinary scholars, students and professionals across Canada and Italy under the coordination of prof. Valentina Pedone (University of Florence) and prof. Gaoheng Zhang (University of British Columbia). A select team of students from both universities were trained by Italy-based Chinese artist and videographer, Ningyuan Zheng, to produce the documentary. Students included Danilo Angulo Molina, Xia Sushanghua, Zhang Yiming, Steven Lu, and Melissa Salvini. The production was made by the Bologna-based non-profit association WUXU, which Zheng was part of. A main goal of this project was to humanize the issue of racism by giving voice to victims of Sinophobia and anti-Asian attacks from Canada, Italy, Denmark, and the United States. It provided them with a space to share both their experiences of coping with trauma and their insights into healing and resilience. From physical and psychological aggressions to microaggressions, the documentary highlights aspects of racism that may be overlooked when we look at the problem at a macro level. Interviewees also spoke about what individuals could do to counter anti-Asian hate at this moment, digitally and physically speaking, and how victims could be supported. |
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2016-2019, video installation, DVD packaging,
Karaoke, DAMSlab, School of integration/ Atlas of Transition Biennal, Bologna, Italy We have transformed the lesson of School of Integration (the project is created by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera for the Bologna festival) to a KTV room, thanks to the creation of Italianized texts, participants will be able to sing Chinese songs contaminated with Italian hits. Lesson # 7 China Chinese Karaoke Chinese songs and Italian melodies, the story of a contamination born in the 1980s The Chinese word "Baolijin" comes from Polygram, one of the most important record companies in the world before it melted in 1999. Baolijin series is created by the artist Zheng Ningyuan, produced together with the WUXU association. In the School of Integration it is presented in the form of a temporary Karaoke. Thanks to the creation of Italianized texts, the public can sing (pretending) Chinese songs, which are actually Italian (or European) songs adapted in China in the 1980s and early 2000s. After the Chinese economic reform of 1978, Western trends and fashions synchronized in China, albeit in a localized way. For citizens, the image of everyday life changes radically. Coastal cities - Guangzhou is an excellent example of this - they begin to import pop music from Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Asia and the western world, a large part of which enters China through smuggling and piracy. The development of the free market in China in the 1980s and 1990s, under the political climate of "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", is very rapid. In those years "Italo-disco" was a great success and Karaoke was widely spread. Polygram popularizes Karaoke, which is still one of the most popular forms of entertainment in China today. This form of entertainment, created to satisfy mass consumption, has informed everyday languages, social behavior, aesthetics, giving rise to various anthropological phenomena covered by this research. Baolijin series is the activation of a playful dimension that collects collective memories and produces untidy emotions. |
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The Big Screen: Cinema and Movement 68' in Italy2018, curated by WUXU (Liu Jing and Zheng Ningyuan)
The Big Workout - AMNUA International Project III, Art Museum of Nanjing University of Arts, Nanjing, China historical documentation, video, film projection program Alberto Grifi / Comitato di lotta dellaRhodiatoce di Pallanza / Cinegiornali Liberi / Carmelo Bene / Gianfranco Baruchello / Luca Maria Patella / Lo Studio di Monte Olimpino /Mario Schifano / Marco Bellocchio / Rosa Foschi /Romano Scavolini / Silvano Agosti / Tonino De Bernardi / Tanio Boccia /Ugo Gregoretti |
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2017, video in color single-channel and sound installation, manual in paper
This work is a reflection on different experiences: text, image, time, perception and game. This project addresses the question of how to dismantle an everyday object or everyday experience and put it back together again. And this dismantling is multiple in terms of sensory experience and multiple in terms of meaning. A video tutorial has been created from a paper manual for using a hammer in Chinese Italian and English. The tutorial demonstrates the demonstrator using it slowly in the park and with the sound of a completely different hammer. The site of the installation synthesises these several experiences with a ground that vibrates due to the sound. |
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