Join Chris Zhongtian Yuan, whose film Wuhan Punk is currently on show at the gallery for an In Conversation event in the West Side Lecture Theatre, Winchester School of Art.
Chris will be in discussion with Marie Jarrell (Games Design and Art, Art & Media Technology at Winchester School of Art) as they discuss Chris’s film and the story behind it.
The name of the city of Wuhan will probably always be inseparable from the onset of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. A low-key, unsung player in China’s rapid industrial transformation, outside of China the country’s seventh city had stayed mostly under the radar until that point. Far from the boomtowns of the Special Economic Zones, and often landed with the dirty work of iron and steel production or heavy-duty manufacturing, Wuhan was allegedly only famous for its grime and its smog. But, as Wuhan Punk suggests, the city’s rampant pollution and constant, deafening din, (not to mention its air of alienated ‘outsiderdom’), may have helped create the conditions for something else that Wuhan became well known for – its vibrant punk rock scene.
Punk had raged across much of the planet well before it reached Wuhan in the 1990s, but its local outpouring was no less fiery for that. Wuhan Punk is an evocative memento of the burst of creative energy behind a particular moment in time.
Wuhan Punk was originally commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in 2020 as part of their BEYOND online programme.