Vortex, a Special Salon of the Cloister Project
Nelson Zhang: The Pervert‘s Guide to HK Cinema
2023.03.10 Friday 19:00
Location
2F, The Cloister Apartments, 62 West Fuxing Road, Shanghai
Speaker: Nelson Zhang
Cinema is the ultimate perverted art——it doesn't give you what you desire, but tells you how to desire.
------ Slavoj Žižek
Žižek refers to cinema as “the ultimate perverted art”, because cinema guide us in the way we dream. These dreams represent our unconscious desires and logics. Thus from cinema, we could get a grip on the psychoanalytic practices and concepts proposed by Jacques Lacan. Hong Kong cinema have very similar logic to the dreamwork which prevails in Southeastern culture, though the structures in HK cinema often appear to be secular or vulgar. Is it possible for us to apply Hegel’s proposition – ‘Spirit is a bone’ (a combination of the most abstract, the spirit, and the most physical, the bone) – to perform an abstract psychoanalysis on the most secular works in HK cinema? We hope that we can investigate and analyze the logics and forces that guide people’s desires in those films.
About the Speaker
Nelson Zhang: Visiting professor at Chinese National Academy of Arts. He holds a Doctor’s degree of philosophy at Tsinghua University. He is the founder of the Philosophy 01 program at Hongkong Cultural Channel, the chief editor of DL. media. He is also a journalist and art critic for various art media.
About the Vortex
Vortex is a long-term project. We will update the content of performance lectures by artists and talks by experts both on- and offline. Following the fundamental approach of connecting local practice, theories, and context, we hope that this nonstandard art venue will become a place of torrents, flux, and confluence.
