Isaac Julien, Mazu, Silence (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010 Endura Ultra photograph, 180 x 240 cm Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves made its west coast premier this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in the largest space yet to exhibit his nine-screen film installation. The film installation, open through December 1 at the museum, braids three strands of time and landscape together: the rural mountains of ancient China, the early Golden Age of Chinese cinema, and current day. Julien, who worked on the project for approximately five years, bears forth a delicately crafted tapestry of film that accesses all planes of time simultaneously.

Inspired by transnational immigration and the 2004 Morecambe Bay tragedy in which Chinese cockle collectors were drowned by the sudden tide on the Lancashire/Cumbrian coast, the film opens with Mazu, the Chinese goddess patron of fisherman and sailors, descending upon 1930s Shanghai. This sets the anachronistic pattern for the film, which challenges the Chinese fastidiousness to historical, artistic, and mythological authenticity. The film weaves through Chinese fisherman traversing mountainsides haloed in white mist; a beautiful, troubled woman riding a trolley through 1930s Shanghai; actual footage from the rescue helicopter searching for the cockle pickers; a sea of soldiers in white marching; the deep ocean rolling like the monstrous skin of something alien. The original score by Jah Wobble performed by the Chinese Dub Orchestra and Maria de Alvear, and Wang Ping’s poem “Small Boats” float through the film like gossamer.

Isaac Julien TEN THOUSAND WAVES (2010) Installation view, The Hayward Gallery, London Nine screen installation, 35mm film, transferred to High Definition 9.2 surround sound, 49′ 41″ Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

In the second half of the film, Mazu is pulled before a green screen, suspended by a harness, her hair blown back by an industrial fan. A master calligrapher letters upon glass with crewmembers arriving soon after to clean and polish the pane. The streets of 1930s Shanghai are denuded as small sections of a wall are pushed across the tracks by modern day crewmembers. The peeling back of the scenes to reveal the production references Isaac Julien’s own deconstruction of our collective consciousness of Chinese mythology, landscape, history, and art.

Isaac Julien Chameleon (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010 Endura Ultra photograph, 180 x 240 cm Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Kathryn Kanjo stated that Isaac Julien “equated his own practice to poetry,” and true to his approach,  Ten Thousand Waves works like nonlinear, sensory-rich poetry. High-definition images lap at each other from screen to screen, the voices, poetry, and music form a chorus, the motifs swell and disappear. “He doesn’t give us a straight narrative,” Kathryn Kanjo added.  “He says, ‘Reality? Why bother?’ He lets the viewer be active. He’s complicating the potential of the narrative with all of these permutations even as he’s making it essential and more pure by repeating motifs or echoing refrains of poetry or music or film images…The abiding the theme is journey and efforts to make a better life.”

Mazu, Silence (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves is a nine-screen video installation interweaving three seemingly discrete narratives that explore the migratory journeys of people whose impetus for movement converges on the sole need to fulfil utopian desires for a better life. Set against the contrasting backgrounds of the blustery northwest coast of England, the rush hour in Shanghai and the misty bamboo forests and mountains of the Guangxi province, Ten Thousand Waves’s motivating incident and first filmic narrative is the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which 23 Chinese migrant workers drowned while picking cockles at the seashore in England while Wang Ping’s poem, specially commissioned for this work, is intoned over Julien’s images. In the second filmic narrative, Julien re-interprets the classic silent movie The Goddess (1934) – a euphemism for a streetwalker – whose protagonist (played by actress Zhao Tao) struggles with her chosen occupation in order to support herself and her son. In the third story, an ancient sea goddess Mazu (played by actress Maggie Cheung) believed to be the saviour and protector of fishermen and sailors in the Southern Chinese provinces, soars above the mountainous Chinese landscape.

Blue Goddess (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Ten Thousand Waves, 2010, Installation view, Bass Museum of Art, Miami. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. Photo by Peter Haroldt.

But if the 55-minute film tests the endurance of any gallery visitor, its heavily down-sized counterpart, shown simultaneously at the Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery (VWFA) white-cube space as photographs/stills from the film, neglects the fundamentals of this monumental work: the labyrinthine, imagistic spaces of nine, double-sided screens positioned strategically to “frustrate the ontological gaze of the spectator” (in Julien’s own words), within which the viewer experiences the truncation of traditional, linear cinematic narratives. In fact, the freedom of audience movement between screens subverts any attempt to establish a coherent narrative and sets up instead, a poetic interplay of images competing for visual dominance that tell of the migratory experience across the installation space.

Yishan Island, Dreaming (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

Unhinged by the lack of context and the significant immersive engagement provided by the film, there’s the hazy sense that VWFA’s wall installation’s inevitable emphasis could only be photography’s proclivity for the duplicitous. In the film, Julien readily draws attention to the level of artifice that is merely hinted at in the photographs in VWFA. If it seems as though Ten Thousand Waves ostensibly indulges in rehashing Sino stereotypes  (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s cinematography for western spectatorship comes to mind here), it is just as quickly dispelled by footage of the production process that Julien weaves into the show. Against a green screen, Cheung dangles on wires in a film studio in front of a green screen while her long dark hair blows around her with the help of a wind machine. But while the dissolution of the mythical fantasy of Mazu serves as an ironic allusion to the oblivious Western articulations about non-Eurocentric Others, Mazu admittedly remains, in this globalised era of transnational capitalism where film grounds much of popular culture, a reminder of the highly marketable paradigm of Asian self-representation.

Green Screen Goddess (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

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Isaac Julien (b. 1960) is a British filmmaker whose work incorporates different artistic disciplines in audiovisual film installations. Ten Thousand Waves: Photographs by Isaac Julien will be on show at the Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery in collaboration with the Victoria Miro Gallery until 26 Feb 2012. The film is presently showing at the ICA Boston until 4 March 2012.