WU WENGUANG'S FILMS AT CONFERENCE OF BIRDS GALLERY

The information below comes from Conference of Birds Gallery.

http://www.conferenceofbirds.com/

Wu Wenguang: "China Village Self-Governance Project"

4-Channel Video Installation
7 June 2008 – 27 June 2008
Gallery Hours Everyday 12pm – 8pm
Opening Party: 7 June 2008 7PM

The Year 2005 saw the beginning of the groundbreaking China Village Documentary Project, which, for the first time in China, opens a visual channel from the villages by putting video cameras in the hands of villagers across the nation. This project represents a new direction for documentary filmmaking in China. In its first phase, the selected topic for documentation was village self-governance:

"What difference has twenty years of democracy in China's 700,000 villages made?" Headed by China's premier documentary filmmaker Mr. WU Wenguang and Mr. JIAN Yi, filmmaker and photographer with the EU program, a group of enthusiastic young people based in Wu Wenguang's Caochangdi("Land of Grass") Workstation in Beijing were the main executors of all these activities.

Context

Village Self-Governance
Acclaimed as a "quiet revolution," China's village self-governance system, started in the early 1980s, can be considered as a significant step in the political history of China. In this new rural governance mechanism installed and protected by the Chinese law, the state power withdraws from the rural areas while the villagers are entitled to elect their own Village Committee and to manage and supervise village affairs in an autonomous and democratic manner. In China's official terms, village self-governance covers democratic election, democratic decision-making, democratic management, and democratic supervision.

The Project

Village self-governance is China's important step forward towards decentralization and democratization. It has changed the dynamics and public lives of China's rural communities, with an estimated total population of some 900 million people. This process, however, is rarely documented for various reasons. This unprecedented project aims at empowering ordinary villagers through documentation through cameras, and seeing the changing realities from the perspective of the people whose lives are dependent on the villages. The films of this project document the daily realities rural people face in China's new village governance mechanism.