Chunning (Maggie) Guo

Artists have specific courage to confront hard memories and tragic truths in the age of absurd. They challenge injustice through their artistic creations. This paper explores the animated memory-telling forms (specifically animated documentaries and Virtual Reality artworks) becoming weapons for social criticism and platforms to rethink what comprises justice. In the past ten years, unjust verdicts have become an important subject of
discussion, especially thanks to contributions from the animated documentary Crulic: The Path to Beyond (dir. Anca Damian, 2011) and Truth Has Fallen (dir. Sheila M. Sofian, 2013). Both works lead the viewer on a complicated journey toward the exposure of multi-layer truth and protest unjust verdicts via powerful medium mixtures.

Furthermore, VR artists have also paid attention to prison, a marginal space and the weak link in the justice system that allows such injustices to occur. In the VR work 6×9 (commissioned by The Guardian, 2016) and After Solitary (dir. PBS, 2017), the experience of “stepping” into a “Live Prison” connects users together and includes the senses of touching, hearing, breathing, and even the illusory feeling of floating in prison. VR artists reconstruct the prison
through a memory-telling form and make use of what may seem to be disadvantages of VR, causing people to feel sick or dizzy while experiencing the absurdity brought from these isolated spaces. These animated memories in the context of pursuing ecstatic truth offer the
public the chance to reconsider prison as a marginal space where injustice is fostered and demonstrate interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, scientists, lawyers, volunteers, social funding organizations and mass media from all over the world. Furthermore, the collaborations shed light on solutions to the problems of prison in treality and also offer a better understanding of working for a just future, which should be a global collective effort.

Chunning (Maggie) Guo teaches New Media Art and Animation at Renmin University of China. She was a creative director for Vancouver Film School, a visiting artist to Central Saint Martins, London, and a resident artist at Centre Intermondes in France in 2014.

She earned her PhD on independent animation in 2015. She was invited to present her papers in Animafest Scanner in Zagreb, Poland, the UK, 2016 SAS in Singapore, 2016 Aesthetics Conference in Seoul, Under the Radar 2017 in Vienna, Women and Silent Screen Conference in Shanghai, and the 2017 SAS in Italy. Her animated artwork, Ketchup (coproduced with Baishen Yan) has been exhibited and collected internationally by galleries and festivals
including the White Rabbit Art Gallery in Australia and the L’abbaye de Fontevraud in France. She was the recipient of NETPAC Award in 2015 Busan International Short Film Festival of South Korea.