Lev Student Research Fellow Faye Zhang presents on art, memory, and Nanjing Massacre survivor testimonies

On Tuesday March 26, 2024, Faye Zhang (PhD student in Media Arts and Practice Program, USC School of Cinematic Arts), a 2023 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, delivered a lecture entitled “‘Life Drawing’: Animating a Short Film about Nanjing Massacre Testimonies” about the research she conducted while spending a month in residence at the Center in Summer 2023. During her residency, she explored the oral testimonies of Nanjing Massacre survivors in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) in preparation to make an animated short film based on the testimonies, which is still in progress. In her lecture, Zhang described her work with the testimonies and reflected on the process of animating trauma and memory.

Zhang opened her lecture with her own positionality in the history of Nanjing as an American Chinese woman. Her grandmother grew up one hour outside of Nanjing, and Zhang commented that she feels like she’s known about the Nanjing Massacre her whole life. The memory of the Nanjing Massacre is mediated through decades of memory, political, and cultural change in China, Zhang explained. Memorialization of the massacre began in China in the 1980s after the Cultural Revolution. Official memory is framed by patriotism and anti-Japanese sentiments. Zhang argued that this framing is evident in the oral history testimonies in the VHA, offering several excerpts as illustrations.

Zhang described the unique features of the Nanjing Massacre survivor testimonies that struck her the most, such as the variety of ways that interviews are mediated by family members who sit next to the elderly survivors or just offscreen. She highlighted the frequent weaponization of victimhood and trauma, the binary between perpetrators and victims, and the emergence and expressions of imprecise memory in the survivors’ narratives. Imprecise memory, Zhang explained, is the notion that memory is not always tied to a specific place or event. Imprecise memory complicates the way that memory is supposed to operate on a linear model. When memories are translated to a narrative form, a certain fuzziness is added to them, Zhang described. Zhang visualized this for the audience with a looped animation she created to accompany her reading of an excerpt from a testimony where a survivor’s memory has circular, recurring, time-indefinite, and poetic qualities.

A combination of testimony and visuality is central to Zhang’s work. As an anthropologist and artist with the aim to historicize testimonies for audiences, Zhang believes that it is crucial to work within the event, rather from outside of it. This process allows her to put together numerous pieces: testimony, imprecise memory, heritage, and artistic styles. These come together in a short film that she showcased, entitled “My Grandmother’s Long Feet.” In this film, Zhang combines the media of collage and charcoal animation to tell the gendered story of traditional Chinese feet binding.

She concluded her lecture with a short film she drew inspiration from – “Obon” by André Hörmann and Anna Samo. The film is an animated short where the soundtrack is the testimony of Akiko Takakura, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan by the United States in 1945. Zhang ultimately argues that testimonies and forms of artistic expression can powerfully be placed side by side because they demonstrate the interrelatedness of each story, resulting in testimony that never stands alone.

Zhang’s lecture was followed by a lively discussion. She discussed more about her artistic choices and how photos and charcoal can interact with each other to communicate a story. She used charcoal in the animation she showed to accompany the excerpt of imprecise memory because charcoal has a fuzzy quality in itself. Zhang touched on the way that official political memory in China shapes the VHA, as the Nanjing Massacre testimonies were collected in partnership with the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. She reflected on her decision to end her lecture with an animation of mass violence against the Japanese in a lecture about mass violence where Japanese people perpetrated the Nanjing Massacre and how this highlights the often-competing nature of factual and emotional memory, as well as making space for multiple victimhoods. She closed by discussing the ways in which art can further illuminate the historical record and deepen our understanding of traumatic events.