Whitney Biennial 2022: 
Quiet as It’s Kept

Floor 6

Born in Hanoi, Vietnam
Lives in Berkeley, CA

Drawing from footage shot mostly in villages in eastern and southern China in 1993 and 1994, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s What about China? focuses on the culture’s rich traditional architecture. The film explores how the concept of harmony in China has far-reaching effects and resonances. As she has written: “Highly valued as a virtue and a guiding criterion in ethics, harmony has played an important role in the lives of Chinese people since ancient times—harmony with society, harmony with nature, and harmony with oneself.” The film’s historical backdrop is China’s Great Uprooting, the displacement of 250 million rural residents to—mostly newly constructed—urban centers. Conceptually, the film is an engagement with the poetics of everyday life and with what Trinh has called “a nonknowing mode.” She has described this as a manner of working where “one remains open to allowing things to come to oneself in an unexpected way.”