Topics

About this talk

Chloé Zhao’s cinema appears to be preoccupied with a recurring theme: how characters confront loss and death, how they grieve, and how they situate themselves within nature and larger cosmological time in order to move forward. This concern runs from her first film Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017), to the Oscar-winning Nomadland (2020), and her most recent film Hamnet (2025). While loss and death lend a desaturated and understated colour to her films, they do not necessarily signify negation or absence. Read through Daoist film (me)ontology grounded in nothingness, Kiki Tianqi Yu argues that Zhao’s cinema gestures toward the meontological dimension of the world, inviting an embodied ethical and aesthetic encounter with the void as regenerative forces. Focusing on Nomadland and Hamnet, Yu examines how Zhao’s cinema manifests regenerative nothingness. Wu (nothingness) in Daoist meontological cosmology functions both as ontic nonbeing, co-dependent with being, and as ontological nothingness, manifested through emptiness and absence (Chai 2019: xiii). Such nonbeing – the loss of Fern’s husband, town, and house in Nomadland , and the deaths of Agnes’s mother, the hawk, the tree, and eventually her young son in Hamnet – sets in motion a journey of rediscovery and rebirth. This journey ultimately sees both protagonists return to a cosmological orientation, situating the self within a much larger world. At the same time, both films, through distinct cinematic approaches – handheld and static shots – embrace an aesthetic of emptiness that foregrounds the natural world following the cosmological time. In doing so, Zhao’s cinema invites Daoist ethical being in world: wuwei (effortless action), wuzhi (non-principled knowing), and wuyu (non-possessive desire), leading to an attunement to spontaneous self-emergence ( ziran ). Organiser This event has been organised by the SOAS China Institute . Image credit: Yux Xiang on Unsplash

→ Book tickets / register (opens in new tab)