The imperial archive of images of Chinese women’s bodies in export paintings, ceramic figurines, decorative fabrics, scientific illustrations, souvenirs for tourists, and photographs of various sorts predates the advent of the motion picture. For those marginalized because of their race, class, ethnicity, or gender, the feverish archival desire described by Derrida (1996 [1995]) may take shape less as a nostalgic return and more as a drive to set the record straight by reframing images that served Orientalist configurations of power. Cinematic Orientalism overlaps with the archival history of ornamental export goods, medicinal plants, and racially inflected theories of disease in Bo Wang and Pan Lu’s video installation Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017) and a section of the essay film Many Undulating Things (2019).

This chapter explores how the installation video and the film use documents such as drawings, photographs, and film clips of China and the Chinese to plumb the depths of the persistence of racism and sexism in visual culture. Bo Wang and Pan Lu draw on Hollywood classics, including D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) and Henry King’s Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), in order to connect the visual archives of imperial science, commerce, medicine, religion, colonial government and policing with the popular imagination through the cinema.

The View from the Archive

The film archive contains considerable evidence of the intersection of race and gender as a legacy of colonialism and imperial conquest. Even the periphery of the film strip holds evidence of bias.