MOCA Artist Film Series: Ai Weiwei

MOCA presented a two-day screening of Chang’an Boulevard (2004) in September 2023, followed by this in-conversation with MOCA Executive Director Johanna Burton and artist Charles Gaines.

An epic moving image work, Chang’an Boulevard traces the forty-five kilometer long thoroughfare that extends east to west, bisecting the megalopolis of Beijing. Dividing the distance into intervals, the artist recorded a single frame for one minute. The entire film is composed of 608 one-minute segments, running over 10 hours long in duration. Beijing, the capital of China for over 600 years, has a clear architectonic order in its urban planning. The film records the city through the transformation of the urban landscape, capturing the rhythms of the city, its social structure, cityscape, planned economy, political center, commercial buildings, and industrial units–revealing the quotidian and everyday of China’s seat of government and power.

MOCA Artist Film Series is organized by Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs with Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. MOCA Artist Film Series is presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation.