PENG Zuqiang (Changsha, 1992) works with film, video and installations. Exhibitions and screenings include Cell Project Space, E-Flux screening room, Times Museum, UCCA Beijing, 25FPS, IDFA, Antimatter, and Open City Doc Festival. He has received fellowships and residencies from IAS CEU, MacDowell, Skowhegan, and the Core Program. He is the recipient of the Present Future Prize 2022, and a ‘Special Mention’ from Festival Film Dokumenter, Yogyakarta for his first feature film, Nan (2020). A resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, he lives and works in Amsterdam.

About the works: 

What might it signify to cast a retrospective gaze upon an unsuccessful assassination attempt? Why does one decide to forget a radical past? Inauguration weaves together two disparate events, dwelling on the periphery of Chinese revolutionary history: the neglected narrative of an unsuccessful plot to assassinate a royal prince of the Qing Empire in 1910 by George Fong, an affiliate of the Young China Association, whilst he journeyed across the United States. This film intertwines the failed assassination attempt with the chronicle of two Chinese-Cuban activists who voyaged to the United States for the inauguration of the Young China Association a year prior in 1909. The film serves as a prophetic narration of the past, shedding light on the processes of historical erasure, memory, and archival anchors of early overseas Chinese revolutionary politics and their repercussions. The illicit revolutionary collective, the Young China Association, was instituted in 1905 by Chinese and Chinese-American individuals residing in the United States. Their ambitious goal was to foster the Chinese Revolution, an endeavor that ultimately resulted in the overthrow of the last feudalistic Qing Dynasty and the subsequent establishment of the Republic of China.