Chinese revolutionary icon Qiu Jin is getting a fresh look at Hong Kong’s Spring Workshop beginning this week, with the world premiere of a new short film from multimedia artist and activist Wu Tsang.In “Duilian,” the Los Angeles-based Wu turns her camera on Qiu, a radical writer and thinker who was executed in 1907 for her role in a failed uprising against the Qing Dynasty. Qiu is popularly known in China as a martyr for the cause of revolution, but this mainstream history ignores a significant part of what made her so revolutionary.A dogged advocate for women’s liberation, Qiu was a proto-feminist; she was also a proto-queer figure, a woman who left her husband to join an all-female group known as the Mutual Love Society. (In Wu’s imagining, these women become masters of the martial art of wushu, “sword sisters” who fight with bravery and nobility.)Wu, who also co-stars in the film as Qiu’s love interest, Wu Zhiying, applies the lens of queerness to Qiu’s life and legacy, reframing the contemporary understanding of Qiu as a historical and symbolic figure while casting light on the ways in which official histories erase narratives of queerness.This notion of peeling back text for subtext is alluded to in the film’s title. “Duilian” is a form of sword fighting in wushu, but the word “duilian” also refers to a form of couplet poetry. In duilian poetry, couplets rhyme in tonal opposition: first one tone, then its inverse. This is the essence of “Duilian”: flipping what is first seen on its head. “Duilian” runs through May 22 at Spring Workshop, in Hong Kong.
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