What if nuclear bomb had not been invented? What if the West had not win the Cold War, would the world be less benign or perhaps less malign? What if the Bandung Conference became a successful movement in gathering the Third World solidarity? What if there was a strong coalition of non-aligned governments in Asia and Africa? What if Southeast Asia had a different grouping that overcame Asia and bypassed the Pacific? What if the Berlin Wall never fell? What if the Berlin Wall had never been built? What if the leftist movement in Asia was able to gain bigger power? How close did we come to alternative worlds the Bandung Conference imagine?







Have you ever heard about Datura Wrightii? Also known as Sacred Datura, this is a perennial plant that blooms only one flower once a year, late at night and then in the morning the flower dies off. What a strange creature: perennial and ephemeral at the same time.


“Do you desire recurrence eternally once more and again?” asked the philosopher who was accused of mental illness in his late life. To endure the idea of the recurrence one needs: freedom from morality; new means against the fact of pain (pain conceived as a tool, as the father of pleasure...); the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism, as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the concept of necessity; abolition of the "will"; abolition of "knowledge-in-itself. That’s what exactly the philosopher have said. Was he under the hallucinatory effect of the Sacred Datura?

The stories here are narrated through the perspectives of three Chinese women from different era: Jian Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong; Ding Ling, a writer who was executed during the anti-rightist movement; and Yuchen Chang, a Chinese artist who currently lives in New York. Animated from Zhou En Lai’s slick and suave character of diplomacy and the malicious Hundred Flowers campaign in Mao’s era, the stories presented in this part revolve around the ambivalent relation between capitalism and communism in China, spanning from the Cultural Revolution period until present time; the endless present which has become shorter and shorter.