ABSTRACT
Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s companion films Still Life (2006) and Dong (2006) demonstrate how both fiction and documentary together illuminate artistic responses to the rapidly changing world of twenty-first-century China. Jia, the Sixth Generation filmmaker, and the painter Liu Xiaodong, his subject in the documentary Dong, both seek formal solutions to representing complex socio-political problems: rapid development, environmental devastation, loosening social bonds, migrant experience, and social violence. Jia’s two films demonstrate the convergences between cinematic realism, a hallmark of the Sixth Generation, and painterly social realism, which Liu has perfected by straddling academic, state, and market art worlds. In both Still Life and Dong, Jia shows how the body becomes historical, how individuals are inserted into conditions that shape them and in turn shape how artists respond to them.
