12/ Dear Beloved, 2017, By Orkhan Huseynov
If you have ever received a scam email, you probably wondered about the kinds of people writing them. Before asking for money or personal data, these messages typically include an elaborate and tragic story which—while fabricated in this particular case—have likely happened to someone at some point in time. Azerbaijan-based artist Orkhan Huseynov took a closer look at this tantalizing shower-thought and turned it into a two-part short film titled Dear Beloved.
Each film tells the story behind a scam email, treating the events described in that email as true. In the first, a doctor from Burkina Faso fulfills his dying patient’s wish by asking an acquaintance to donate money to an orphanage. The second focuses on a man trying to protect his own finances. In both segments, Huseynov blends techniques from drama and documentary filmmaking, blurring the lines between what’s real and what’s not. In the process, his film reminds us that these kinds of emails are not always written by cold-blooded criminal organizations, but sometimes by real people living in desperation.
Dear Beloved is one of 54 short films that together make up After Hope, a one-of-a-kind exhibition currently on display at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Abby Chen, one of the museum’s lead curators and the current head of its Contemporary Art Department, worked with dozens of recommenders across Asia to put together a selection of short films. These films, though different in length, style and subject matter, are united by a common theme: they explore the role of hope in art and political activism.
In the past, the Asian Art Museum has largely focused on preserving age-old canons: Buddhist statues from Nara-period Japan and earthwork from Korea’s Goryeo dynasty. Following the opening of the museum’s new Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion—an 8,500-square-feet showroom space designed specifically for continuous, uninterrupted multimedia exhibitions whose construction finished in early 2020—Chen felt it was time for an exhibition celebrating contemporary Asian and Asian American artists alongside the traditions on which they stand.
Artists such as the Chinese-born, California-based Connie Zheng focus on examining “diasporic memory, ecological elegy and divergent articulations of hope from an environmental justice perspective.” Her short film The Lonely Age, the first in a trilogy of dystopian sci-fi shorts, is set in a toxic wasteland whose remaining inhabitants stumble across rumors of the existence of “seeds” with curative properties. Word has it they come from a factory in China after washing up ashore.
None of this information is explained to the viewer outright and is instead inferred from little clues planted throughout the film. A family in HAZMAT suits and smog-filtering face masks are asleep in the blood-red dirt. One of them mentions how he hopes his “cough” will go away, alluding to the poor air quality plaguing cities and industrial towns around the world. The landscape this family wanders through is barren, yet filled with human waste. Broken roads create piles of crumbling asphalt; construction sites have long fallen into ruin.
In film and television, dystopias often have an almost romantic quality to them. While working on The Lonely Age, Zheng wanted to see if she could use this haunting beauty not to lure people into an undesirable tomorrow, but as a repellent that could inspire them to turn around and head in a different direction. Voice-overs from people of the near-future talk to their past selves,. hoping these seeds can restore a nostalgic childhood filled with grandma’s baked pies and the changing seasons. Like many Californians, Zheng has had trouble keeping her present and future separate ever since a wildfire ripped through the state, covering the Bay Area in smoke for more than two weeks straight. “When your friends have to evacuate and you're wearing a N95 respirator in your own bedroom, it became obvious to me that a Parable of the Sower-esque scenario is not a far-fetched nightmare,” she told me over email, “but an outcome that is contingent on our action in the here and now.”
Alison Nguyen, Dessert – Disaster (still), 2017-18, HD video, double-channel installation or single-channel screening. Courtesy of artist.
Zheng isn’t the only filmmaker tackling climate change in their work. One of the most impressive films in After Hope is Alison Nguyen’s Dessert-Disaster, for how it manages to do so much with so little. As the title suggests, Nguyen juxtaposes media coverage of natural disasters with Chef’s Table-like close-ups of treats: a milkshake mixer resembles a maelstrom; cars engulfed by a flood remind us of a melting ice cream cone; and splatters of chocolate milk move in the same trajectory as plumes of lava when they are spat out of an active volcano.
It all makes sense if you think about it. At the end of the day, physics is still physics. But the comparison between desserts and disasters goes even further as Nguyen takes a closer look at the way in which catastrophe is typically presented to us: media coverage is sensational and borderline cinematic, almost as if the documentaries and news shows want to capitalize on some embarrassing instinct. We enjoy watching terrible things unfold from the comfort of our living room, while doing something about them requires giving up that comfort.
Many short films in After Hope take a deconstructive approach to the craft of filmmaking and likewise, the curators thought critically about the layout of the exhibition space itself. “The showroom is incredibly uncinematic,” Chen, the show’s curator, tells me over lunch. “When we go to cinemas, we expect the space to be dark and quiet so we can lose ourselves inside the reality of the film. Here at the museum, we want you to remain aware of yourself and the fact you are being caught between two worlds.”
Bright museum lights prevent you from becoming fully immersed in any of these stories, which is appropriate considering the films in this exhibition weren’t made to excite or entertain viewers. Instead they inform about ongoing crises, many of which are taking place on the other side of the planet. This idea is emphasized by the back wall of the showroom, which is decorated with real-world paraphernalia sent in by the filmmakers. A protest sign in a film about a pro-democracy march somehow becomes much more than just a prop when it’s hanging right behind you.
Evgeny Granilshchikov, Courbet’s Funeral (still), 2014, single-channel digital video. Courtesy of artist.
According to Chen, a goal of the exhibition was to unite Asian communities through their struggles, whether that’s against impending climate disasters or autocratic rulers. In order to pull this off, it was crucial that After Hope not only include films made by filmmakers from East Asian societies, but also places like Iran, Russia and Azerbaijan—countries geologists and anthropologists consider part of the Asian continent, but which most people continue to think of as distinct and separate geopolitical entities.
Quite a number of films in After Hope come from countries where art and entertainment are being heavily censored. In Russia, the state prohibits the distribution of films that question its principal beliefs—in 2012, the Kremlin imprisoned members of the feminist punk rock bank Pussy Riot and banned screenings of their documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer. Back in the days when the tsars still ruled, Russian writers made their novels as long and complicated as possible to sneak their more radical ideas past the censors. Now, Russia’s youth are similarly forced to get creative.
In Courbet’s Funeral, Russian artist Evgeny Granilshchikov stitches together phone recordings of young Muscovites following the Crimean crisis in which Vladimir Putin’s government occupied part of the Ukraine. The title could be a reference to Gustav Courbet, a French painter who helped set up the Paris Commune, called for the reopening of the city’s museums, and attempted to organize an intellectual salon free of government interference. Courbet left a powerful impression on future generations of socialists, including those that ran Russia before the Bolsheviks did. The film delicately offers a critique of the state that can only be read if you look between the lines. One teenager explains she is afraid of flying because she’s uncomfortable giving up control of her life to someone she doesn’t know or trust. On one level, she could be talking about the pilot. On another, she could mean the government. Likewise, another young woman aspires to become a curator at a museum because she wants to be in charge of assembling her own history.
Tina Takemoto, Looking for Jiro (still), 2011, single-channel digital video. Courtesy of artist.
Though many of the projects on display in After Hope push the definition of film to its limits—and many of the artists involved do not identify as filmmakers—this exhibition still lends itself to a film criticism-style approach. Using moving images as their primary medium of expression, these artists turned cameramen juxtapose colors, sounds, shapes and movements in order to communicate a specific feeling or idea to their audience. Even in the most experimental shorts, action and time remain two invaluable currencies.
Tina Takemoto’s Looking for Jiro—in which the artist reenacts the daily life of a gay prisoner locked inside a Japanese American internment camp—may well have started out as a performance piece but it eventually ended up as the recording of one. Taking full advantage of the additional tools, Takemoto added and subtracted colors to highlight similarities between actor and subject. They also added cutaways to skimpy bodybuilders and—most importantly—timed the editing to a slower-pitched cover of Madonna’s iconic 2005 pop song “Hung Up.”
“Hung Up” is about a woman who is angry at a partner she cannot break up with. It’s also about waiting for what seems like an eternity, an ordeal which incarcerated Japanese Americans faced every day. Takemoto could have picked other songs with comparable themes, but deliberately stuck with Madonna because she—despite being a heterosexual woman—is still considered a gay icon, a subtle reminder that Takemoto and Jiro are linked across time and space through their mutual involvement in the LGBT community.
Jiro, whose full name was Jiro Onuma, moved from Japan to America when he was nineteen, in 1923. An avid collector of homoerotic imagery with a passion for photography, he left behind some of the only known pictures of same gender loving Japanese Americans inside internment camps. Moved by Jiro’s story, Takemoto told me over email that they made Looking for Jiro to honor his ability to endure unbearable situations with the power of patience—an art the Japanese call “gaman”—as well as “open up a space for [his] fantasy and pleasure.”
Chitra Ganesh, Metropolis (still), 2018, film video, digital animation with sound. Courtesy of artist.
After Hope is a fitting title for the exhibition because artists can interpret it in two ways. Some focus on what happens after we find and are ready to take action. Others try to show us what the world might look like without hope. In this case, optimism and pessimism, agency and helplessness, care and apathy, are but two sides of the same coin, and what unites them is the belief that hope—regardless of whether it hurts or helps us in the end—is an ancient and powerful emotion that, for whatever reason, civilization just can’t seem to live without.
The exhibition was put together at the right time. A little over a year ago, the spread of coronavirus from China into other countries caused a drastic increase in xenophobia and racist sentiment in the United States. According to NBC News, anti-Asian hate increased by as much as 150% during the pandemic, prompting activists to reevaluate the way people of Asian descent are treated as well as how they are represented in entertainment. After Hope empowers Asian artists by constructing an international network that puts their struggles into perspective.
Could museums play a bigger role in providing a platform for independent film as art instead of artefact? “Absolutely,” asserts Shaghayegh Cyrous, an Iranian American artist and curator whose recommendation for After Hope could not have been made in her home country. “Iranian cinema is rich outside Iran,” she says. “Inside Iran, filmmakers have to navigate many challenges. Women, members of the LGTBQ+ community and even some men are having a hard time finding work because of heavy censorship, mandatory hijabs and human rights issues.”
When I met Chen, the first things I learned about her as a curator was that she wasn’t a huge fan of movies. To her, the medium’s heavy reliance on technology got in the way of what art should really be about: fostering relationships. She shifted her focus to short form content because she wanted to see a closer connection between creator and creation. True hope, after all, rarely exists in corporate and mass-produced action blockbusters and superhero movies, even though they try harder than anyone to end on an inspiring note; it most often comes from the faces and voices of individuals who come together outside the channels of power.