Rife with arthistorical references, Beyond Index follows a group of Chinese art students working in a painting factory on the precise imitation of classic paintings from the Western canon. This strict adherence to tradition shifts with the arrival of Yves – both a character and a drug. Slowly intoxicated by Yves (Klein’s) words, and the mind-altering color blue, the students undergo an awakening, and begin to consider an alternative, less polluted, reality. Beyond Index denies traditional film rules and instead follows its own, artistic rules.

It is also a trance-image collage, set to the music of the Berlin-based deep-house- duo ÂME. You can watch the film (photographed by Jia Zhangke’s regular cameraman YU LIK-WAI as a travelogue across economic superpower China, a meditation on capital and utopia.

At such a time as now, in which it is apparent that art is implicated in regimes of social control and the production of capital – when even “artistic critique has become an important element of capitalist productivity”, Beyond Index seeks to question whether it is possible for art to subvert in the manner of Yves. Can art be called upon to undermine, or even destabilize the regimes of neoliberal capitalism? Can it be called upon to awaken spectators from passivity?

Beyond Index

Portret van Gerald van der Kaap

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