There is something undeniably haunting about an object that has traveled across borders, contexts, and even states of being. Tonight, I found myself at the Chisenhale Gallery here in London for an evening that felt less like a simple film screening and more like an excavation of memory and ownership.
We were there to see 'Beeld', a film by the Amsterdam-based artist Leah Zhang. The premise is striking, the "diasporic journey" of a Chinese Buddhist statue, acquired by a Dutch collector in the 1990s, which was later revealed to contain the thousand-year-old mummy of a monk. But the film is far more than a documentary about an artifact.
In a brilliant creative choice, the object itself is never actually shown on screen. Instead, the cinematography adopts the "gaze" of the statue. We see the world from its perspective, the hospitals, the museums and the private storage units, reframed through a lens that turns every single frame into a deliberate, standalone photographic work.
Because the statue remains unseen throughout the runtime, the focus shifts entirely to the humans around it. We see the faces of those who encountered it; an enthusiastic doctor, a meditative curator, a hesitant collector, and a security guard, all reacting to a presence that we, as the audience, can only imagine. The "big reveal" only arrived during the post-screening discussion and Q&A, a moment that felt earned after spending the duration of the film contemplating the weight of the invisible.
The discussion between Zhang and the event’s organizer, Zhejun Gao (the Asymmetry Curatorial and Research Fellow at Chisenhale) was enlightening. I was particularly interested in the conversation about religious objects and their shifting contexts. As Zhang explained, the film isn't really about the object itself but rather about what is attached to it. It’s about how significance is projected onto an item and how that value is continually reshaped by our own cultural, institutional and economic needs.
The title Beeld, the Dutch word for both "statue" and "image" acts as the perfect anchor for this. It forced me to reconsider the "unstable passages" between the sacred and the commodity.
Leaving the gallery, I couldn't help but look at the world around me a little differently. We often treat historical objects as static things but tonight was a powerful reminder that they carry a trajectory, a transformation, and a story that doesn't necessarily end just because it has been placed in a display case.
Artist Website: https://zxzhang.com/beeld
Gallery Website: https://chisenhale.org.uk