Beginn des PhD-Programms / Start of the PhD-Program:
WS 2025
Betreuung / Supervision:
Henning Engelke, Christine Reehs-Peters
In this practice-based research, I probe the troubled Chinese socio-political situation as lived experiences by reimagining the enigmatic Asian cinematic device, the empty shot. The empty shot, also known as the pillow shot, is unique to Asian filmmaking, describing a shot of scenery or non-human subjects which functions outside of linear plot progression. I hypothesise that empty shots can reveal how silenced entanglement of history, memory, and trauma are materially inscribed, thus opening up possibilities for revolt against political erasure. I ask: How can I expand the use of the empty shot in film and visual art practice to salvage censored histories of contemporary China? To answer the question, I focus on two China-based case studies — my hometown, Shenzhen, the ‘city without history’, and the 2022 COVID lockdown of Shanghai, which officials claimed ‘never happened' — complemented by a series of workshops in Linz to further explore how empty-shot strategies might work in the European context. My methodology consists of 1) an autoethnographic perspective on publicly denied history, 2) empty shot imagemaking scrutinising the material absence, remnants, traces, and discordance, 3) a diffractive study of Taoist thought and feminist new materialism for my conceptual re-interpretation of the empty shot, and 4) individual and collaborative writing-with practice to create narratives for empty shots. Through this multidisciplinary framework, I weave together the political, personal, and aesthetic in/through strategic, expanded empty-shot experiments across lens-based and writerly means. I will disseminate my artistic outcomes in China (censored) and Europe (uncensored) for comparative insights to find out how the empty shot operates within and beyond censorship systems. This project contributes to the contemporary development of empty-shot aesthetics and offers an artistic strategy for resisting authoritarian control over historical narratives.