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M+, Hong Kong, © Isaac Julien
Isaac Julien 艾薩克．朱利安
Ten Thousand Waves 萬重浪
2010
Ten Thousand Waves was inspired by the disaster at Morecambe Bay in northwest England in 2004, in which twenty-three undocumented cockle pickers from Fujian Province drowned in a rising tide. In a set of moving images displayed across nine screens, Isaac Julien weaves together tales of modern and ancient China; footage of the migrant workers; a recreation of Wu Yonggang’s 1934 film The Goddess, with Zhao Tao playing the role of the nameless protagonist who works as a prostitute to support her child; and the story of the goddess Mazu, played by Maggie Cheung, who is said to protect Fujianese fishermen from danger at sea. Although Ten Thousand Waves focuses on displaced Chinese workers, it can also be read in the context of the larger refugee crisis in Europe in the early twenty-first century and in terms of Julien’s own background, as the son of immigrants to the United Kingdom from Saint Lucia.
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