Jiajia Zhang: Domestic News

In the lower-level gallery, a cylindrical space clad in mirrored surfaces features five synchronized videos, presented as a chapter from an ongoing film project, that open onto scenes filmed across Shanghai. Seated on motorcycle saddles, viewers face the screens as if entering a traffic system, a rotating restaurant, a news cycle. Like a panorama or praxinoscope, the installation produces a rotating field of images in which interior and exterior constantly shift back and forth, as the city appears to extend beyond the room while folding back into its surface. 

Across the screens, the city reveals itself through fragments of flows and pause. Passing traffic, LED advertising displays, architecture at nighttime, GPS navigation systems, and murals in progress alternate with quieter scenes of people waiting, eating, sweeping, or standing still. Boats drift across waterways while cars trace seemingly arbitrary routes through illuminated streets. Meanwhile, text and signs dominate the environment with ads and digital interfaces. Buildings, machines, and signage guide, motivate, and contain bodies that move through the urban landscape, producing a choreography in which people watch machines that watch them in return.

The footage, filmed by Jiří Makovec, is interwoven with a script by Aurelia Guo. Drawing on memoir, reportage, political theory, and literature, the narration recounts floods, diasporic childhoods, marriage markets, and clandestine revolutionary fantasies. Rather than describing the imagery, the text runs parallel to it. Human figures are continually mediated by the systems around them as voices move through phones and microphones and images circulate through cameras and drones. Automated announcements overlap with human speech in Mandarin and English, live and recorded, broadcasted and intimate. A rendition of the song Gong Xi Gong Xi (Good Wishes, Good Wishes) anchors the installation. Composed in 1945 during the Second Sino-Japanese War to celebrate the end of occupation and the survival of winter, the song has since been recast in mainland China as a cheerful Chinese New Year anthem. Transforming wartime endurance into recurring celebration, historical trauma is absorbed into ritual and civic optimism. 

In the stairway leading to the gallery, a prismatic billboard displays floral arrangements that intermittently appear and disappear. Set against the contemporary city’s dense semiotic landscape of billboards, LED displays, mall promotions, safety advisories, and patriotic slogans, the framed display draws from an anecdote in Zhang’s grandmother’s memoir. During the period of Japanese occupation, flowers placed on windowsills signaled covert resistance meetings: their presence meant the house was safe, while their absence warned that it was not. 

Presented in New York, Domestic News places two imperial cities in dialogue. If Shanghai registers the velocity of ascent, New York offers a premonition of aftermath. The installation’s loop concludes where it begins, with an illuminated fountain and the returning refrain of celebration. Winter is over, spring is coming – a mechanism of return that renews itself without resolution. Celebration overwrites catastrophe. Empire appears not as a linear rise or fall, but as a rotating system: seasonal, infrastructural, and self-regarding. Within the mirrored chamber, spectators become part of this circuit, neither fully outside the spectacle nor fully inside it.