Isaac Julien, Ten Thousand Waves | MoMA

- It's a work that is very much about entering into an immersive environment. We try to make each installation very unique to the actual space it's installed. In the mountain atrium, it's that you're able to work with the verticallity for the first time of the work. Using nine screens where you're able to sort of move between screens, or view them from different angles. We'll try to encapsulate this idea of movement within the work, but also how you view the work. What inspiration for Ten Thousand Waves begins in more conveying. In 2004, when 23 chinese cocal shell pickers from the Fujian province from China died when they were trying to pick for cocal shells in the north of England, I felt very moved by the tragedy because they had come from such a far distance to meet this kind of horrid end, and I thought it would be very interesting to try to view this tragedy not from the current European point of view, but (mumbling) from a Chinese point of view. And it took us about three years to discover the Mazu fables. Mazu is the sea goddess from the Fujian province where the Chinese cocal shell pickers originated from. And one of the things that I thought that would be very interesting, so try to view this from Mazu's point of view, and in bringing the lost souls back to China, so to speak, through Mazu's journey, which spans over, I would say, 400 years of Chinese history, begins in modern day, then we go to 30s Shanghai, and then we end up in the Ming period in 15th century China. We shot in the Guangji province in China. Of course, having Maggie Cheung play Mazu was sort of very important, and one of the things, I think, in relationship to making it work, was the idea of trying to use (mumbling) devices, ways of trying to alert the audience that they're watching a film. For example, in the green screen section, when you foreground it, it doesn't necessarily take away let's say, the magic of those scenes, in the same way that there's labor into people picking cocal shells or there's labor into making images, and you can't make images without that labor. One of the important collaborations was working with different composers. Jah Wobble has a band called the Chinese Dub Orchestra, so that's this marriage between east and west in his work. And then, of course, there's the work that was done by the sound designer, Mukul Patel, and also Adam Finch who is the multiple screen editor for my works. And then the 9.2 surround sound dubbing that we made for the work was very unique. We're trying to make a piece of work that would have sound become more sculptural in the space, also become foregrounded as well as the image. And, in a way, when you make a multiple screen work, you're able to make those kind of decisions in a much more, sort of, creative manner. There are all of these sort of aesthetic quests that we wanted to sort of pursue and make in the work to make it a unique experience.