Waza: No Wave

Dark, narrative-less video art that somehow has stumbled into existentialism.

The Wuhan-based Waza group’s video ‘Las Vegas’ gropes its way towards the future and will most certainly become an art-house classic in the years to come. It mops up the psychic afterbirth of the Olympic period’s post-partum depression.

Though they may not know it, these Chinese artists have stumbled into existentialism and Beckett’s ‘Waiting For Godot’ without the benefit of the master himself.

No doubt about it, Waza has made a very boring flick. Instead of ‘New Wave’ it’s ‘No Wave’. There is almost no dialogue. Everything is dark – or hazy. There is no narrative build. You keep waiting for something to happen, but almost nothing happens. You are constantly poised on the precipice of an event that never arrives.

All you see is dull, tasteless apartment interiors, inane street scenes and bumbling strolls through craggy forests. Intimate encounters are staid and alienated. A half-clothed girl writhes for her boyfriend. He barely notices.

When they finally couple it’s only for a brief second before they head off in opposite directions, barely acknowledging each other – as if they’d bumped in to one another on a crowded city bus.

The neo-angst twosome, dressed in overcoats, later collapse inside a greenhouse, a hothouse environment of induced narcolepsy.

Because there is not much history in video art, and not much money either, there are no expectations and no constraints. A bunch of burned out painting students threw up their hands, tossed away their brushes and began to film what really matters. And, as in all art, that’s all that ever counts. Ellen Pearlman

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