Reporting on the 70th Anniversary of Empress of China Reached Canton, 1854
Video | 7min | 2019

The work was originally commissioned by Triple Canopy in 2019 for the upcoming exhibition “Raid the Icebox Now”, which was to take place in RISD Museum in Rhode Island. The work was planned to be installed inside RISD Museum’s Pendleton House, built in 1906 to exhibit Charles Pendleton’s collection of early American arts, furnitures, 19th century decorative arts as well as various objects collected from China, Brazil etc. However, for numerous reason, this work was never exhibited on-site.

The video itself is a 7-minute mock TV report supposedly dated back to 1853. A TV anchorman visited Canton to cover the 70th anniversary of Empress of China’s successful arrival in Canton. Right after independence, the United States faced severe embargo enforced by the British. To explore oversea trade partners, Empress of China, a three-masted, square-rigged sailing ship of 360 tons, left New York on Feb 22, 1784. It turned out to be an extremely profitable trip when it returned to New York in May 1785. The success resulted in a wave of private investments into China trade. The commercial exchange with Canton laid the foundation for the capital accumulation in New England, and produced magnate like John Perkins Cushing, Warren Delano Jr., John Murray Forbes, among many others. In the Canton trade, not only was tea, ceramics, lacquerware was traded, but most prominently opium. Taking a reference from the often problematic “reporting-Chinatown” TV genre of today, and anchoring itself in a moment of the transition of America’s imagination towards China, this work tends to reflect on the deep intertwined relationship between the two empires and open up questions on the foundation of the world order as we know today.

 

A Work by: Bo Wang

Produced by:  Guo Jing

Casting: Cliff Johnson, Wu Xiaoou, Guo Jing

Assistant Editor: Hanwen Zhang

Special Thanks: Matthew Shen Goodman