Sinofuturism is a vector that traverses the whole of the system we know today as capitalism. It is uniquely a capitalist phenomenon in which production for the sake of production as state-sanctioned dynamic becomes the norm, and profit-generating governance ceases to be a part and parcel of the production processes. China, with its multilayered, highly automated, ever-growing, and near-autonomous production power, is the domain of this vector, and as a state of utter puissance, it also works as an emanator or distributor of it. In today’s China, one seems to see the future of all.

 

As a homonym of Lawrence Lek’s Sinofuturism, this curation is dedicated to and affected by the vector. In eight films, it illustrates, directly and indirectly, the contemporary condition of neo-modern China, and tries to make sense of how it is and can be interpreted, historically and intuitively, despite its dizzying complexity. Accordingly, none of the films in the curation are purely fictional, and many of them are not even strictly documental, but are located between the domains of fiction and non-fiction, like their focus of interest. Hence, the motto: if China turned into a fable, let it be fabulated.

 

In its entirety, the curation gathers the films that portray China after World War II, and implicitly, how the overdue modernization conditioned China to grow exponentially and indefinitely. Around the post-World War period, China was still underdeveloped, had nearly withdrawn from the world economy, and was shrinking financially. Historically, it had one option: to “accelerate the process”. And it certainly did. These films do not explicate how it did, but rather manifest the outcome. In this sense, and in this sense only, they are sinofuturistic. None of them was “made in China”, but in a sense, they did.