WAVE AFTER WAVE AFTER WAVE: THE MULTI-CHANNEL IMMERSION OF ISAAC JULIEN'S TEN THOUSAND WAVES

Livesey traces the installation's references back to Chinese cinema and the deaths by drowning of Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecombe Bay, and usefully extends his scope to consider the challenges imposed on spectators by the monumental screens that, by their placement, de-center the audience. Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves recontextualizes the archival record of the Morecambe Bay disaster, placing it among more familiar, paradigmatic imagery representing China's historical emergence as a global economic force. The work is a poetic interweaving of images derived from dominant representations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chinese culture--an idiosyncratic and compressed visual history of China shaped by Julien's long-standing interactions with the worlds of Chinese art and cinema, and his commitment to exploring the politics of representation and, more recently, themes of globalization.