Director Vincent Ward on "Rain of the Children" and his Relationship with the Tuhoe People

    A young Puhi on her wedding day (Vincent Ward)

by Clare Pennington

Published: March 5, 2013

BEIJING — In 2007, 17 Tuhoe people originating from New Zealand’s remote Te Urewera territory were arrested and charged with terrorism. The following year the charges were dropped in exchange for lesser ones, but the event had already re-opened old wounds. The police had last carried out a full-scale raid in the land in 1916, killing two and arresting the tribe’s leader and his son. The second raid brought echoes of that first invasion which had never been forgotten.

Design, then, it might seem, that director Vincent Ward’s “Rain of the Children,” which is showing at this week’s New Zealand on Film festival in Beijing, was released the same year terrorism charges were dropped. The film is a docudrama that looks back at the life of the Tuhoe woman, Te Puhi Materoa Tatu, a survivor of the 1916 persecution.

In fact there was no connection intended by the film’s director, Vincent Ward, but the release of his film and the backlash from the 2007 raids coinciding is a reminder of how old colonial tensions continue to play out in modern New Zealand.

Pregnant with her first child, Puhi’s brother-in-law was shot dead, her husband and father-in-law, the prophet and Tuhoe leader Rua Kenana, arrested. Often referred to simply as “Puhi,” she was to have fourteen children by three men over the coming years, and suffer the loss of all but one, her last son, Niki.

Ward’s interaction with the Tuhoe tribe began with filming an octogenarian Puhi and her son Niki for his first feature, the documentary “In Spring One Plants Alone” (1981) in the late ‘70s. “For [“In Spring One Plants Alone”] I was more like a fly on the wall,” Ward told ARTINFO.

But Ward was not a passive observer — he lived on and off with Puhi over two years beginning at the formative age of 21. “There had been other documentaries made about Maori peoples, but they tended to be observational, anthropological studies. They were very detached ...and they lacked veracity.”

His relationship to his subject was at once societal and deeply personal, and it is outtakes and other footage from this first feature that make up a large part of “Rain of the Children.”

Ward achieved this intimate footage by spending most of his time with her helping her do chores, or driving her where she needed to go. Every few weeks, the film crew visited for a couple of days, after which she would promptly kick them out. “She had a temper. Once when I was filming and not helping her, she knocked the camera right out of my hands,” he remembers.

Archival images, reconstructions and interviews with Puhi’s descendants, as well as Ward’s own personal voice over, combine to make up the rest of the film. By his, but foremost the Puhi’s descendants’ choice, it is her own relatives that act out the reconstructions of her life.

And these reconstructions, often in black and white or desaturated color film, are essential to gradually presenting the beliefs held by Puhi and her community. For a while, we not only observe but are also drawn in to understand how the Tuhoe believe in a world that oscillates between the dead and the living, and how Puhi came to see herself as cursed. And finally our eyes and hearts are opened to her search to communicate with her lost children, by drawing herself closer to the world of the dead.

And in a way, she, like the colonial wounds inflicted on her community, has herself lived on beyond her own death. “In a reassuring way the old lady haunted me,” said Ward. “I kept interpreting her life.”

“I wanted to look at her in terms of her people, not my people,” he explained. Hence the lack of judgement on the community that at times took her children, or worked her to the bone. “Taking feminism as a perspective is a high moral, caucasian judgement,” he said as one example.

It was taking on new perspectives that Ward learned from living with Puhi. Puhi, Ward said, brought him a whole new extended family. But she also did more than that to change him.

“She stripped away the boundaries of my understanding of what life could be and is. It’s like you open a door and walk into another world and suddenly you have a range of experiences open to you, and I had someone there who was a friend and a guardian. Who helped me survive it somehow.”

And now, says Ward, he hopes he can bring this message to audiences around the world, especially, he says in China, where tumultuous, fast-paced change has rocked communities that might understand where his take on a Maori peoples’ history is coming from.

"Rain of the Children" is screening at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art on March 10, 2pm

Originally posted in Artinfo China. 

Interview: Zhang Shouwang on Carsick Cars, the UCCA Electric Music Concert, and His Generation

    Split musical personalities: Zhang Shouwang in Beijing (Photo courtesy Renhang)

by Clare Pennington

Published: March 2, 2013

 

BEIJING — Zhang Shouwang, founder of what is perhaps China’s most popular indie band, Carsick Cars, was writing and performing music for his other band, White, before Carsick Cars ever played to a livehouse.

“For White I was writing music for massed guitars with six or seven different guitarists,” Zhang told ARTINFO. “One of the cool things always about the music scene in Beijing is that many of us are able to work on different kinds of music [at the same time] and there is no pressure to make only one kind of music.”

With this in mind, Zhang will be performing at the second Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) “ON | OFF” concert on Monday, focusing on experimental electric music, along with Eli Marshall and Chui Wan frontman Yan Yulong, “who is one of my favorite of the younger musicians in Beijing,” said Zhang.

But at the same time Zhang is also planning to tour in China and abroad with both of his bands this year, and is working on a new Carsick Cars album (“We will work with a producer from one of my favorite bands in the world but Maybe Mars has asked us not to say his name yet because we are still organizing it,” said Zhang).

Apart from the UCCA show, Zhang also has plenty of other personal projects on the side. “I still do many shows with Carsick Cars and White, but also I do many experimental solo and collaboration shows at places like XP,” he said.

Until he was 17, when he heard a Velvet Underground album for the first time, Zhang didn’t think much about music. “Photography was more interesting for me,” he said. At univeristy, he studied what he refers to as “some kind of technology” for two years before dropping out to concentrate on his music.

“Most of what I heard was either music from TV or pop music, and some of it I really liked, like Michael Jackson, but it was not really something I thought belonged to me. It was for old people, or for people who lived abroad.”

Velvet Underground was not only beautiful in Zhang’s opinion, but it “also sounded like music that young people in Beijing could make. So that was when I thought that I can make music too that isn't a patriotic song or a love song or something like that.”

Without having had formal training (the musician has done a lot of self-teaching and reading over the years), Zhang sometimes composes for classical music ensembles. He shrugs this off, though, when asked about how he got into this and what he thinks of classical music. “I don't really think that music has different kinds. If you like to make music you try to make music that seems exciting to you and you use different ways to make it. A chamber ensemble is different from a rock band and so it is like making a sound with a different instrument.” The idea of thinking in terms of strict differentiations between genres  just “isn’t interesting.”

Zhang admires and has played with the American composer Glenn Branca, and considering his experimentation with drone guitar and harmonic series this doesn’t come as a surprise. “I even played with him for his 10th Symphony in New York and met some of his friends, who showed me more music,” said Zhang.

The upcoming UCCA concert will also seek to experiment with harmonics through the electric guitar, Eli Marshall told ARTINFO in another interview. Working with various artists in a plethora of styles, there is a sense of constant learning that eminates from the now-established musician.

This concert series runs in parallel to the “ON | OFF” art exhibition, and focuses on the post-Mao generation of artists. Zhang said of this focus that his parents’ and grandparents’ generation could not pass down the values they held close to his own contemporaries because their own experience was and is so different. “So we didn't know what to do. We didn't have anything that we liked that we could work with. That made us try to make something for ourselves, I think,” said Zhang.

“If you hear our music you don't say that it is normal Chinese music or normal foreign music,” Zhang opined.  It is “Beijing music of our generation.”

The “ON | OFF: SWITCH”  electronic music concert is on at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art  at 6pm on March 3.

Originally posted in Artinfo China. 

Q&A: Brandnü Founder, Nathan Zhang, on his Upcycling Fashion Boutique

    Nathan Zhang in front of Brandnü in Wudaoying Hutong

 

by Clare Pennington

Published: February 27, 2013

 

BEIJING — Nathan Zhang is wearing a new hat made from second-hand sweaters and unused, discarded fabrics — it's a patchwork of subtly-interwoven colored diamonds in some blocks and striking blue-and-white stripes in others. The soft, palanquinesque winter item is from his shop and fashion label, Brandnü, conceived of in 2009 as a charitable enterprise.

Zhang works with migrant women to create the patchworks used in the clothes he sells, all in the name of a socially and ecologically responsible fashion enterprise. And with the new fashion lines his designers use the materials to make, Brandnü straddles the line between new fashion and vintage. “All I wear is garbage,” he joked to ARTINFO when we asked what clothes he was sporting — every one was made from upcycled materials or was second-hand.

But that doesn’t mean Brandnü, which also gets donations of discarded fabric from factories surrounding Beijing like Yida, isn’t the real thing. The shop's roster of designers includes some of China’s best up and coming names. Between them, he points out, they’ve designed for Hermes and even Björk.

ARTINFO finds out more about the man and the story behind his tiny fashion space in one of Beijing’s trendiest hutongs:

How did you get into fashion?

I have always liked fashionable clothes — even when I was young in the ‘70s and lived in a small city in Liaoning where you couldn’t buy anything. I was always able to find a way to make things looks unique. I guess I was just born with a good sense of color and style.

What brought you to the idea of opening Brandnü?

I always liked the charity shop model in Canada, where I lived for 10 years. When I came back to Beijing from Toronto, there was nothing like that here, so I decided I would open my own charity shop. My friend was by coincidence renting a space in Wudaoying, but he never used it, so after he heard my idea he told me to use it for free for a year. That’s how I came to Wudaoying Hutong.

Before that I was chief director for a local TV station [in Xinjiang]. I thought it would be more creative, but it turned out to be exhausting work, so after almost a year I quit to find something more interesting. I decided to start my own project, which became Brandnü.

Who were the first designers you worked with? 

The first designers I ever worked with were Zhang Na, who has her own brand called Na Too, and Sara Yun who also has her own [eponymous] label. Sara is a good friend of mine and we first met in my shop — she was very inspired by my project so she asked a lot of questions. She had the talent and I had the resources, so when one day I decided to do “second-hand fashion,” Sara designed the first few fashion lines, which I still use to today.

I also met Zhang Na at my shop, and she was the first designer to use my patched fabric. These have become really popular items.

Who are you working with the most on a regular basis?

Zhang Na is the designer I work the most with. She has been using my patched fabric to make collections which are the same as her regular ones. Her designs are very detailed, and have lots of childlike fun. Her [upcoming] Spring and Summer collection this year is inspired by [the story of] “Peter and the Wolf”.

What about your most recent collections? And how involved are you with these?

I have never designed a collection to be honest. I am more of a project coordinator, working with migrant women and fashion designers. For Brandnü, our newest collection is going to be something more mainstream and for easy wear.

Most of the clothes I like or design myself are inspired by the things my kids play with or like. For example, I designed a cape with spikes on the back inspired by my kids’ dinosaur toy. (Zhang is also wearing a lime-green, felt, fish-shaped pouch round his neck that one suspects came from a similar flash of creativity.)

How is Brandnü financed? What is its set-up and place in the market?

I borrowed money from my family to start Brandnü. It is a social enterprise. I wanted to provide job opportunities to migrant and rural women whilst producing the most fashionable upcycle items on the market. I want Brandnü to be recognized for being a creative, well-intended, and environmentally-friendly brand.

How did this come about with the migrant workers and can you tell us a bit more about what do they do?

At first when I opened my shop I took clothing donations, which I then gave to the migrant worker community. There are five second-hand clothes shops in the area and they sell these donated clothes to the migrant workers who can’t afford brand new ones.

Within that community, there were quite a few women who couldn’t work because they had to take care of their kids, so the migrant worker organization set up a migrant women’s sewing cooperative. I saw they had no idea what they wanted to do and neither did they have the ability to make things in a way that added value to them.

When I then discovered that there were so many second-hand clothes that they could not be sold individually and were having to be sold by weight, I came up with the idea to cut them into patterns and make them to patched fabric, which could be used in different ways to turn these old clothes into fashionable products.

I pay the workers according to how much patched fabric they have made. It is important to work with them because they lack opportunity. Since I am good at building bridges between different groups, I have kept working with them and am still trying to keep improving their living conditions. Right now I am working on an International Women’s Day event and trying to raise money to improve the migrant women sewing cooperative’s working conditions.

What is the difference between clothes and fashion?

Clothes are there to keep you warm, while fashion is there to show your attitude. Fashion means free, unique and young.

Originally posted in Artinfo China.