Backlit Affections: The Discrete Time of Tianjiao Wang

With red bean (2025), Beijing-born, Chicago-shaped filmmaker Tianjiao Wang reimagines experimental documentary as an act of attention—where light, silence, and durational integrity become an ethics of looking. “Experimental film asks for courage,” she says. “Not because it’s difficult, but because it insists on being honest about time.” Honesty, in Wang’s cinema, looks like dusk smearing a tablecloth, a Bolex’s steady whirr, a single gesture allowed to live until it exhales. Her latest 16mm short is both homecoming and hypothesis: that the discreteness of analog frames can cradle a city’s fragmentary rhythms better than any seamless digital flow.

The moment it “clicked” for Wang wasn’t at a desk with a syllabus but in a dark box, a first visit to an art house theater that left her unusually, unexpectedly well. “The first time I went to an art house cinema, I felt what I now hope my films can do—a healthy sensation,” she recalls. “I was moved to tears; I felt genuinely touched.” That sensation—not spectacle, not thesis—has become her north star. “If a shot still breathes, I let it stay; if it no longer carries presence, I cut.”

Her pantheon orbits James Benning, Chantal Akerman, Ken Jacobs, and Rose Lowder, but not as mere citations. Benning’s Ten Skies cracked something open: the audacity of simplicity and the projective presence of cinema itself. “It’s not just the skies being shown,” Wang notes. “It is the projector performing the skies.” Landscape Suicide did something else—minutes of stillness that struck her like weather. “The camera may be fixed, but the content is always changing—time is passing. I often find myself at the end thinking: Is that it? Is it over so soon? I haven’t seen enough.”

Confront the stillness

If Benning taught her to trust stillness, Akerman taught her to confront the thing itself. No Home Movie’s pixelated collapse—mother dissolving under the pressure of a zoom—made visible a distance that language can’t bridge. “She is unafraid of letting cinema freeze limited spans of time,” Wang says. “What I carry from her is the attempt to reach the very thing she wants to reveal, and to confront it through cinema.” Wang’s own confrontations are quieter, perhaps, but no less exacting: she films until a shot has “lived,” and then—only then—lets it go.

red bean was made in Beijing in the winter of 2024, on 16mm, because the city and the medium speak to each other in discrete syllables. “Analog film has a discreteness that digital cannot replicate,” Wang says. “That quality resonates with my feelings toward Beijing—they are intensely, almost infinitely discrete.” The grain holds heat like a hearth. The register of color and light—especially under backlight—carries emotion without announcement. “Beijing’s rhythms are discrete; 16mm honors that.”

The film opens with a near-still life: a jade-green vessel glowing against a window, a white plate with an orange, another orange turning under a knife. As the peel lifts, a fine spray of juice bursts and hangs—an ordinary miracle, visible because silence and scale have made room. “Precision and ordinariness can coexist,” Wang says. “It becomes ‘over-stylized’ because it is cinema—because we are watching it in the sacred space of a dark-box theater, projected with light.” The sacredness isn’t piety; it’s attention. The image is permitted the dignity of its own time.

Light breathes through cinema

Light is character in red bean—backlighting that edges bodies and objects into soft flare, winter sun filtered by smog, outlines dissolved to tenderness. A Roman friend once told Wang that Rome’s light is “hard,” making things crisp and etched. In 2013 Beijing, under a prolonged haze, she found the opposite lesson: when the sun can’t cut cleanly, surfaces blur, colors thicken, boundaries soften. Gu Changwei’s gentle orange light in Farewell My Concubine is a touchstone; red bean rhymes with it without quoting. The film’s vivid color and high-contrast light become vessels of emotion—nostalgia, melancholy, yearning, intimacy—without ever naming them.

Wang’s formal interventions—a slip in frame rate, an iris breath, a tilt of white balance through filters—are not tricks but tiny displacements that let the everyday come into focus. “In daily life, we don’t notice these subtleties,” she says. “It is precisely through cinema that such nuances can be revealed.” The revelations are modest but cumulative. Time, she suggests, is the primary material; light, color, texture, and gesture are its inseparable companions. Attend to one and the others answer.

Her editing philosophy refuses the calculus of audience tolerance. “The length of a shot depends on whether it has fulfilled its own life, not whether it risks testing the viewer’s patience,” she says. What seems indulgent to one viewer may be necessary to another. The image, if true, sets its own metronome. Silence, too, is structural. Shooting on a Bolex that records no sound, Wang chose to keep the film quiet. “Sound can very easily overwhelm and make a film emotionally heavy-handed. Withholding it allowed the details of light, color, and rhythm to breathe on their own.” The motor’s purr kept time for the maker, not the audience.

Kitchen whispers truth

Domestic gestures—peeling, rinsing, the choreography of a meal—inevitably summon comparisons to Akerman’s kitchens, but Wang’s posture tilts toward pleasure. “I wanted to convey something different: women enjoying themselves, their hands touching the food,” she says. Domesticity, in red bean, carries memory and migration rather than only critique. These are the rooms where childhood habits echo, not as nostalgia but as recognition: the ordinary can be a site of care and continuity. “The kitchen can be tenderness, not only critique.”

If truth exists in this register of cinema, it is approached, not declared. “Perhaps the notion of ‘true’ is analogous to language,” Wang offers. “Do the words we speak ever fully encompass who we are?” In red bean, truth is asymptotic—the horizon a camera can near through structure and rhythm, through returns and revisions. She didn’t arrive with a predetermined architecture. She shot what called to her—places missed, rooms remembered—and built the film later, discovering its temporal spine in the edit. “Editing is how I become familiar with what I shot.”

Constraint sharpened the work. Finite stock, heavy camera, held breath. “I hardly wasted any film,” Wang says without bravado. The limit narrowed hesitation, not possibility. Serendipity survived: the spray of orange juice, the moment a backlit edge flares, the way a hand pauses because the light has changed. “Constraint made me attentive to every frame,” she says. “The camera’s sound is reassuring.”

Frames linger beyond time

Beyond red bean, Wang’s collaboration with a close friend yielded Tread (2024) and Fall (2025), two portraits of a presence that seems at ease with cinema’s time. “The camera is like the double-slit experiment,” Wang jokes; observation alters behavior. Some people, by temperament, aren’t rattled. Tread was meticulously directed—Wang enjoys control, precise verbal prompts, a set tuned to effect. Fall emerged from trust: conditions cultivated, then patient waiting. “Some people are naturally attuned to the screen,” she says. “I cultivate conditions, then wait.”

Beijing—endlessly photographed—invites a particular ethical posture: proceed with care but refuse rigidity. “Because there are so many declarative approaches, new perspectives become necessary,” Wang says. The city’s events and lives are inexhaustible; film must return, not to repeat, but to update the gaze. For newcomers to experimental film, she offers a simple entry point: look for arrangement. “Even without dialogue or conventional story, the compact montage offers a path,” she says. “Follow the arrangement; it will guide you.”

Wang’s ambitions are not nationalist banners but formal questions. As a Chinese artist who has lived and studied in the West, she resists overemphasizing “Chineseness” while remaining alert to the tropes that shadow her genre. The task ahead is refinement, not repetition—bringing something personal and alive to a lineage she respects. If time is the armature, light and color are how it gets under the skin.

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Red bean echoes elsewhere

Months after a screening, someone will approach her and mention red bean. That delayed echo is her preferred metric. It suggests the film has continued to breathe somewhere else—inside another person’s day, in the light on their own kitchen table, in the pause before the peel lifts and the juice lifts with it. Experimental cinema’s power, red bean reminds us, lies not in spectacle but in its capacity to transform the ordinary into an encounter—quiet, exacting, and, yes, healthy.