Olympia, produced by German director Leni Riefenstahl for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, is a documentary rare for the amount of controversy it has generated. Riefenstahl’s cinematographic genius expanded the aesthetics of documentary film, but this cannot obscure the fact that she was a central figure in Nazi propaganda efforts. At the track and field competition, Olympia captures Jesse Owens winning gold along with another interesting event: long-distance runner Sohn Kee-chung engaging in counter-propaganda through Riefenstahl’s camera. Born into Japanese imperial Korea, Sohn had to accept his Olympic gold medal on behalf of Japan after winning the marathon. He deliberately covered up the Japanese flag on his chest at the medal ceremony filmed by Riefenstahl’s team in order to reject his colonized status. Unbeknownst to the filmmaker, this one-minute clip included in Fest der Völker (Festival of Nations), part one of Olympia, became archival evidence of ethnic consciousness. Compared to Nam Sung-yong, the other Korean on the podium who made no symbolic gestures, Sohn’s sensitivity to the camera is obvious. For me, this event calls to mind Taiwanese athlete Chang Hsing-hsien, who was also sent to Berlin as part of the Japanese Olympic delegation. If he had run one second faster in his relay race, he would have been able to defeat the Polish team and advance. If he had been standing on the podium and faced Riefenstahl’s camera turning towards him, what would he have done?
Translated from the Chinese by Bridget Noetzel.
Musquiqui Chihying is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Taipei and Berlin. His multi-media practices explore the human condition and environmental system in the age of global capitalization, as well as the subjectivities and social cultures of the Global South. He has been shown in international institutions and festivals such as Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2020), 68th Berlinale (2018), UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2018), Taipei Biennial (2016) and Shanghai Biennale (2014), among others. He is the winner of the Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Award 2019. He is currently an assistant professor of media art at the Taipei National University of the Arts, and the founder of the Research Lab of Image and Sound.
Bridget Noetzel is a translator, editor, and art consultant based in Hong Kong. She received a BA in both Chinese Language and the History of Art from Yale University. Since 2009, she has worked with galleries and artists in Beijing and Hong Kong, and she has translated and edited for major publications, institutions, and auction houses. In 2017, she co-founded the Asia Photography Project. She was the translator for Yi Ying’s history of modern Chinese art, entitled Art and Artists in China 1949-Present (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
平行奥运 Olympic Reveries
In tandem with the Tokyo Olympics, Heichi Magazine is hosting a parallel assembly of artist essays. Olympic Reveries emphasizes the cultural spaces opened up by sports and the illusion of spatiotemporal unity created by live broadcasts. We invited artists to extend the ideas of athleticism and national culture into their practices and speculate on real or imagined games that present values different from those of mainstream sporting events.
