Poet on a Business Trip
Ju Anqi
雎安奇
Production date
2015
Object Detail
Media
video (black and white, sound)
Measurements
103 min 28 sec
Notes
In 2001, Ju Anqi went on a month-long journey home to Xinjiang, on China’s far north-western frontier, to visit his parents. En route the idea came to him to make a nihilist road movie about ‘life, feelings and lust’, centred around a travelling poet. The result is the remarkable Poet on a Business Trip, shot in 2002 but not released until 2015. Ju found his protagonist, young poet Hou Xianbo, in a grungy bar in Beijing’s Sanlitun. During their epic 40-day journey, hitchhiking with long-distance truck drivers or enduring crowded local buses, traversing highways and dusty backroads under the vast skies of the Uyghur Autonomous Region, Hou (re-named ‘Shu’ in the film) wrote 16 poems; they punctuate the film like chapters of a book. When he is not writing lyrical verse or contemplating nature, the poet seeks out sex workers in karaoke bars and brothels in each new village or primitive truck-stop. Ju says, ‘This is a sensory world on the road, constantly parting and reuniting.’ His film juxtaposes a bare-bones, bleak, but beautiful landscape with the urgency of sexual desire, presented in a deliberately graphic and unromantic style. Xinjiang, wrote the poet, is ‘a utopia even more wanton than you imagine.’
Accession number
2016.007