Chris Zhongtian Yuan: Wuhan Punk

The name of the city of Wuhan will probably always be inseparable from the onset of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. A low-key, unsung player in China’s rapid industrial transformation, outside of China the country’s seventh city had stayed mostly under the radar until that point. Far from the boomtowns of the Special Economic Zones, and often landed with the dirty work of iron and steel production or heavy-duty manufacturing, Wuhan was allegedly only famous for its grime and its smog. But, as Wuhan Punk suggests, the city’s rampant pollution and constant, deafening din, (not to mention its air of alienated ‘outsiderdom’), may have helped create the conditions for something else that Wuhan became well known for – its vibrant punk rock scene.

Punk had raged across much of the planet well before it reached Wuhan in the 1990s, but its local outpouring was no less fiery for that. Wuhan Punk is an evocative memento of the burst of creative energy behind a particular moment in time. Through archival material and atmospheric digital animation, Zhongtian Yuan ponders the current whereabouts of Mai Dian, the charismatic frontman of the punk group, Si Dou Le. While his memory and influence lives on in the mind of the film’s narrator, traces of his music have mostly disappeared, along with the venues that the Wuhan bands would have performed in.

A drone camera high above the city reveals a gleaming vista of recent urban development that has doubtless replaced many of those older neighbourhoods, forming a pattern of renewal and gentrification that is also sweeping across much of the globe. Punk may have generated fear or loathing for its mood of menace and apocalyptic pandemonium, but it may be that a rising tide of consumerist homogenisation poses a more pervasive and insidious threat.

Wuhan Punk was originally commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in 2020 as part of their BEYOND online programme.