Murky colors

"Murky Colors" is an expansive 47-minute multi-narrative, single channel video derived from the artist's father, Menjin Wei's suspense-spy novel of the same name. Collaged together documentary and appropriative strategies explore the personal and political processes at work in adapting Menjin's made-for-Hollywood story. Appendix A is the research paper written in FPA 812, and consists of two parts: an introduction to, and a chapter from a hypothetical book written in the context of the MFA's malleable framework of interdisciplinary-academic practice. This meta-text combines the personal– in the form of transcribed conversations and narrative fragments centered around the making of "Murky Colors", with the political– in the form of a historical exploration of Hollywood Classical Realism and its avant-garde counterpart, video art. While the introduction conceptualizes the whole arc of the dissertation, the chapter focuses on the question of critical distance in self-ethnography, and refers back to the introduction.