Films byTexts by Wang Bing

Wang Bing (1967) is a Chinese film director. He graduated from the Film Academy in Beijing in 1996. His debut as a filmmaker came in the form of the monumental Tie Xi Qu [West of the Tracks] (2002): a three-part, nine-hour document of China’s transition from state-run to free-market economy, and a chronicle of the Chinese working class. From then on his films have always started from encounters with people on the margins of society amidst the vast and rapidly changing landscapes of 21st-century China. His other works include San Zimei [Three Sisters] (2012), He Fengming [Fengming, a Chinese Memoir] (2007), Fang Xiu Ying [Mrs. Fang] (2017), Dead Souls (2018) and the installation Caiyou riji [Crude Oil] (2008). In 2017, Wang Bing received the Golden Leopard for his film Mrs. Fang at the Locarno Film Festival and was awarded the EYE Art & Film Prize by the EYE Filmmuseum, where his work was exhibited in 2018.

FILM
West of the Tracks
Wang Bing, 2002, 551’

West of the Tracks details the slow decline of Shenyang’s industrial Tiexi district, an area that was once a vibrant example of China’s socialist economy. Part I: Rust focuses on the daily lives and work routines of Chinese workers in three different financially troubled state-owned

FILM
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir
Wang Bing, 2007, 186’

“The American poet Muriel Rukeyser asked, ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?’; her answer: ‘The world would split open.’ The tragic extremes of Fengming’s biography seem to demand such a cosmic response, or at least some physical manifestation or visual correlative ons

FILM
The Ditch
Wang Bing, 2010, 112’

During the “Great Leap Forward” from 1958 to 1961, Mao’s Anti-Rightist Movement resulted in the “re-education through labour” of middle-class intellectuals and government officials that were declared to be “rightist.” Some three thousand political prisoners were arrested and sent to the Jiabi

FILM
Three Sisters
Wang Bing, 2012, 153’

New Left Review: How did you meet the three little sisters there? As your film shows, they are living mainly by themselves, without parents to take care of them.

FILM
Bitter Money
Wang Bing, 2016, 152’

Film Comment: What’s your next move?

Wang Bing: Traveling, shooting, editing, more traveling, more shooting, more editing. [...]

FILM
Wang Bing, 2016, 148’

“Cinema can’t get more iconic than this, as the Ta’ang, made itinerant by war, create shelter with whatever they can find, which usually means sticks and stones. Wang watches as a group tries to build a frame for a tarpaulin roof with bamboo poles scavenged from what grows along the road.

FILM
Wang Bing, 2017, 86’

“Fang Xiuying is the mother of a good friend of mine. I was going to make a documentary about her in 2015, but it was postponed because I was too busy at the time. In 2016, the friend called to tell me that her mother’s illness had grown severe, and she might not live very long.

FILM
Wang Bing, 2018, 495’

“Since I began researching the history of Jiabiangou State Farm in 2004, I have met and interviewed nearly one hundred survivors of Jiabiangou.