Island Fever

Drawing on films made by Chinese state studios in the 1950s–1980s, this work revisits island narratives of war, revolution, espionage, and class struggle once shaped to engineer shared sentiments. Images from these features are dismantled and recomposed as propaganda dissolves into tropical murmurs, blurring borders between history and fantasy, individual and collective.

Pan Lu: ‘The film’s source material is drawn from fifteen narrative features produced by Chinese state film studios during the socialist period from the 1950s to the 1980s. Set on islands and at sea, these films told stories of war, espionage, revolution, and class struggle. Images once used to shape collective consciousness and mobilise emotion are here dismantled and reassembled, becoming an unrecognisable fever dream. The echoes of history intertwine beneath the water; the language of propaganda turns into the night-time whispers of coconut palms, seeping into every sleeper’s dreams. The island’s borders gradually dissolve within the afterimages of these frames, and the boundary between individual and collective, reality and fiction, blurs in turn — inviting viewers into a labyrinthine dreamscape where a call both familiar and strange can be felt.’