This page contains links to articles, interviews, and videos that can be incorporated into course syllabi or used for individual student research. For detailed event information, visit saic.edu/cate.
Trinh T. Minh-ha: What About China?
Wednesday, March 26, 6:00 p.m. CT
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
Faculty can reserve tickets for their classes here.
Please note that All CATE events will have real-time captioning (CART). Hearing loops, wheelchair seating, and companion seating are also available at the Gene Siskel Film Center. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu
Winner, New:Vision Award, CPH:DOX 2022
Winner, Prix Bartók, Jean Rouch International Film Festival 2022
2022 Whitney Biennial
In her latest film, renowned artist, filmmaker, composer, and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha revisits Hi8 video footage she shot in rural China in the 1990s to explore the country’s intersecting narratives about itself. Guiding her inquiry are Chinese concepts of harmony, which Trinh dynamically traces through past and present, finding examples in the architecture of Hakka round houses and the Chinese Communist Party’s large-scale projects to shift populations from urban to rural and back again. Visually and sonically stunning, What About China? weaves together personal histories, poetry, folk songs, and ritual into a rich and polyphonic reflection on the shifting relations between self, community, and state. Followed by a conversation with the artist.
Co-presented by SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program and Conversations at the Edge. Additional support provided by the Penny Stamps Speaker Series at the University of Michigan.
All CATE events will have real-time captioning (CART). The Gene Siskel Film Center is ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu
Tuesday, March 25, 6:00 p.m.
Trinh T. Minh-ha Artist Lecture
The Art Institute of Chicago, Fullerton Hall, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Tuesday, May 6, 6:00 p.m.
Forgetting Vietnam
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
Trinh T. Minh-ha is a world-renowned filmmaker, writer, composer, and distinguished professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Her practice has been honored in 69 retrospectives around the world. Trinh’s body of work includes nine feature-length films: What About China? (2021); Forgetting Vietnam (2016); Night Passage (2004); The Fourth Dimension (2001); A Tale of Love (1996); Shoot for the Contents (1991); Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989); Naked Spaces (1985); and Reassemblage (1982). Several large-scale multimedia installations include In Transit (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020); L’Autre marche (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris 2006–2009); Old Land New Waters (3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China 2008, Okinawa Museum of Fine Arts 2007); and The Desert is Watching (Kyoto Biennial, 2003). Numerous publications include Lovecidal: Walking with The Disappeared (2016); D-Passage: The Digital Way (2013); Elsewhere, Within Here (2011), Cinema Interval (1999); and Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989).
Her many awards include the 2014 Wild Dreamer Lifetime Achievement Award at the Subversive Film Festival, Zagreb; the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from Women's Caucus for Art; the 2012 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association; the 2006 Trailblazers Award at MIPDoc in Cannes, France; and the 1991 AFI National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award.
Her latest film, What About China?, has received the 2022 New:Vision Award at CPH:DOX Film Festival in Copenhagen; The 2022 Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival; the Prix Bartók at the 2022 Jean Rouch Film Festival; the Inspiration Award at Viet Film Fest; a Special Commendation at the BFI London Film Festival; and the Presidential Award at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Film Festival.
VAP's Trinh T. Minh-ha Resources
The following materials relate directly to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film What About China?. For resources related to Minh-ha’s other films, installations, and writing, please refer to the Visiting Artists Program Resource Guide.
Trinh T. Minh-ha [Interview]
Shivani Radhakrishnan | Bomb Magazine | July 18, 2022
How Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Game-Changing Films Thwart Binary Thinking [Article]
Tausif Noor | Art News | September 13, 2023
The Roots are Deep: What About China? by Trinh T. Minh-ha [Article]
Casey Wei | ReIssue | 2022
The Enduring Power of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Anti-Ethnography [Article]
Patrick J. Reed | Art Review Asia | October 19, 2020
Trinh T. Minh-ha and Ute Meta Bauer in Conversation on What about China? [Interview]
Trinh T. Minh-ha and Ute Meta Bauer | Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, vol. 20 (2) | p.145-152 | 2021
‘There is No Such Thing as Documentary’: An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha [Interview]
Erika Balsom | Frieze | November 1, 2018
Conversations at the Edge Lecture Recordings
Conversation at the Edge video recordings (2016–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.