Some call it DIY, others call it workers’ control: Interview with Lily Jue Sheng

Last summer, Lily invited me to moderate the Q&A for a retrospective of their films at Anthology Film Archives. For me, Q&As have always seemed like a strange post-screening ritual where a filmmaker talks to a programmer, critic, or another filmmaker from anywhere between five and twenty minutes, and even though most of the time nothing really gets said, everyone always seems really happy after the fact. Lily knows I feel this way. Apparently, this sort of feeling is why we get along, even though my “job” as a freelance critic or curator is to sort the art world’s labour market on a mercenary basis by assigning value or employability to certain works or artists over others. Further to that point, the fact that I objectively understand the freelance critic or curator as a kind of manager in the production of bourgeois culture is why we are comrades. So, when they asked me to moderate, I knew the assignment was to bring working-class politics into a public discussion of their films, grounding them in the sites of labour and struggle that Lily has been part of throughout their life as a worker and organizer. In many ways, this interview is an extension of that inherently limited conversation, compounded with many others we have had in our study group, at art worker gatherings, and while we workshop theories and strategies of organizing from our respective sites in this virtually unorganized sector. 

Steff Huì Cí Ling: Could you talk about how you framed your last screening at Anthology Film Archives, which is also where you work? Let’s start with the title.

Lily Jue Sheng: For those unfamiliar, Anthology is a theatre and archive focused on avant-garde, independent, and experimental film located in the East Village, New York City. I went with the title “Work and Place in the Workplace” for a single-filmmaker program that took place on June 6th and screened six of my short artist films. I have been working there on and off, starting as a technician, and presently as a theatre worker, for exactly one decade.

The title is a play on the words “work,” “place,” and “workplace,” chosen to evoke one’s concept of and relationship to these categories, such as my own with these films. They recreate places I visit and revisit in my day-to-day life, in addition to the affective and sensory qualities I associate with being there. Their production and semiotics emerge from labour infrastructures I can easily and cost-effectively navigate given my vocation. These conditions make it possible for me to work, but I recognize how it’s still beholden to the history and rules inside a bourgeois cultural market.

The title plays with pulling the curtain back to draw attention to my position on work, especially undervalued work and wage theft. Cinema and artistic work activities are necessarily mystified to fuel a culture industry running on free and underpaid labour. The activities of your practice, at least if you’re a working-class artist/filmmaker, are largely a form of wage theft that you’re deeply conditioned to feel grateful for. The activities of the wage labour you do get paid for is notoriously low if you work in or adjacent to the culture industry. It’s less taboo to address publicly these days, but there’s a pervasive backwardness to maintain the current system—that regression is coming from a place of precariousness. There’s the same deep conditioning in our jobs, in which we believe our jobs are unique. The idea that we should just be grateful that they exist at all, or as you worded it in your essay, “In praise of hockey players on canvas,” that belief in art is a prerequisite to exploitation.¹

SHCL: What has pulling back that curtain looked like for you? You’ve said in a previous conversation that political consciousness takes patience; it takes a prolonged and focused examination of the social quality of one’s work within the past, present, and future of capitalism. How has your political consciousness developed as a film worker?  

LJS: The short answer is that I stay plugged into organizing, as well as cinema and culture sector work. Sometimes different communities do work together; a lot of the time they don’t. It’s all good, and I learn a lot.

The long answer is that many activities in artistic practice are the same as any other kind of worker. By worker, I don’t only mean employed participants of society receiving wages. Much like the race- and gender-oppressed, undocumented, elderly, disabled, and youth, cultural labour falls within the reserve army of labour. A working-class artist or cultural worker carries untapped energy. As a filmmaker and worker, categories I find to mean the same thing, I have little control over my working time and circulation in a bourgeois cultural market. I’m restoring my control when I build the world I want to live in with the tools I already have. In an earlier time, people called this DIY. Given the cyclical motions of past, present, and future crises manufactured by capitalism, the evolution of DIY is making proactive decisions to do a variety of activities that may fall outside the purview of film production—like organizing.

Filmmakers can take back control of their work. What that looks like for me is developing working-class contexts and communities. However, it rarely works to transform your art into your activism because the cultural market transforms it into astroturfing.² I don’t individually produce films about labour organizing for this reason. Instead, my principles as an organizer remain close to my individual film practice which reflects my broader social development.

SHCL: How do you trace the social development of your work starting from your earliest films? Are there any moments in conception, production, or presentation where political consciousness has intersected with cultural work?

LJS: I will trace it over four films: Mercurial Matter (2014), Force Majeure (2015), Change (2017), and Heritage Architecture (2024), especially the historical context and references in the last two.

The tensions in these films move from more abstract to documentary, albeit in a non-linear progression. I produced Mercurial Matter and Force Majeure at a time when I was fixated on rephotographing film (optical printing, lowbrow re-recording, and scanning techniques), the films I watched in college, the films of Stom Sogo that I watched every day at my job, and the music that raised me long before film. My attitude in making them mirrored Stom’s, insofar as he said, “I try not to have a message or even word in my movie. But I usually have some sick stories behind each of the movies.”³ So, typical of the things artists believe and say in their mid-20s after art school indoctrination.

I wasn’t concerned with the things I’m now saying when I produced Change a couple of years later. The process of producing Change consisted of reading, copying, and consulting the I Ching (Book of Changes), the Chinese body clock and calendars. It’s in the chronology of logographs, the incremental layers and split logic, and Change’s makeshift status as an object where an unstable set of social relations can be traced out of the film’s contents. One of the most notable aspects is the unstable chronology, like the totality of time moving from the agrarian feudal era to the Cold War and beyond in under 6 minutes. My texts are more succinct when producing energetically polemical films in comparison to conversations and writing. At the same time, the film’s contents are more symbolic and not a predetermined critique of the film industrial complex. I did historical research, but I don’t approach research with a specific critical inquiry that I plan to bake into the film and argue for. That’s closer to how I behave as an organizer, but with artist films, it’s not my goal to make the contents ideologically and materially on the nose.

SHCL: When you refer to the symbols in Change, you mean the ideographic qualities of Chinese characters flashing intermittently as your reverberating voice reads them out loud alongside instrument and drum tracks. I’m trying to describe (for the readers) how the sensorial quality connects with the linguistic symbolism.

LJS: Change and my artist films are closer to poems, composed music, or a sensory environment than directed short films. It’s why I add “artist” in front of “film,” even though I mostly screen them, and rarely install them in exhibitions. Change is a bit of an anomaly; it’s stylistically strange, but popular among a wide mix of viewers. Audiences who have and haven’t been indoctrinated into “experimental film” receive it with—the good kind of—curiosity. However, the majority of viewers also struggle to understand its broader historical context.

Historically, Change has only ever circulated in what we could call an “alternative economy.” When it comes to screening opportunities, I don’t pay to work, so I don’t submit to a lot of film festivals. Recently, it’s gone beyond a festival circuit’s shelf life: it screened last year with comrades in “Not For Sale: Material Traces of Protest in Chinatown & LES, 2002–Present,” in a film program titled “ENCAMPMENT-OCCUPATION” at the first New York Counter Film Festival, and also streamed with Ultra Dogme, a collectively run online film journal and cinema. I’m in solidarity and struggle alongside the people who organized these programs or screened their work.

SHCL: Initially, Heritage Architecture can appear like an aesthetic travelogue treated with essayistic editing, but there is a cache of references that speak to the political economy of filmmaking.

LJS: Heritage Architecture is a landscape film. The scenes show cultural and commercial sites located in Shanghai, where I was born, and parts of Northern Taiwan where I know people. It heavily draws from Masao Adachi’s A.K.A. Serial Killer (1975). Heritage Architecture encapsulates this region I habitually go to every few years, accumulating records of the same few places that change but also don’t change in between my trips. The film was shot in the summer of 2023.

I researched Japanese-constructed architecture before shooting, especially Hongkou, Shanghai’s lane housing streets and Taipei’s commercial districts. I also returned to an exercise I picked up from the late filmmaker Jonathan Schwartz: in-camera editing with 100-ft rolls of film. Heritage Architecture plays over three rolls.

I came up with the title Heritage Architecture after watching my footage, as it cites the heritage conservation of buildings, and in Shanghai, it reifies the petite bourgeois memory of alleyway homes. Architectural styles that appear are longtang, lilong, and shikumen. Jie Li’s Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life was another influential reference. My aunt’s block, my uncle’s block, Lu Xun Park, a Lao Shanghai-themed “street” food court, a neighbourhood’s worth of condemned houses, and the Bund appear in the first roll. Taiwan’s tourism is driven by street markets and the spiritual economy of local temples. Taipei’s oldest commercial district features a small City God temple, the main religious icon remaining in Old Shanghai. Daxi Old Street and Keelung’s Ghost Festival water lantern ceremony are scenes in the second roll.

A Maiden’s Prayer is the melody in the final roll. The song signifies being in Taiwan and taking out your trash. It plays over every scene on Dihua Street. Semi-public, semi-private pedestrian chatter plays over eminent domain properties around Hongkou and film sets inside Shanghai Chedun Film Park. The rhythm of in-camera editing and on-location sound breaks here. It reproduces the hauntologies these places are charged with through national heritage architecture. This film is not agitprop, but the ebb and flow of personal, historical, and structural content that weaves politics with art. It’s similar to how Trinh T. Minh-ha framed her films in opposition to the armchair anthropological documentary but was cognizant that the film’s surface resembles the ethnographic films she’s criticizing, and that she works in the academy. I’m also arguing that the primacy should not be on what a film looks like.

That being said, I’m not trying to synthesize revolution in my individual practice. I’m autistic; I pick up the vibes from the surrounding environment more organically than the subtext of social exchanges I have with most people. My films have strong animist sensibilities, but I want to talk about it like a historical materialist.

SHCL: In the past, we’ve debated what we think “proletarian art” is even though we still live in a bourgeois society. Your films have a proletarian standpoint and remain necessarily in an exchange relation with capital, or rather capital’s surplus. I’m interested in discussing the tension between working-class intention and the bourgeois context. I do see a lot of working-class culture being produced in working-class spaces, but they don’t circulate in the same way that bourgeois culture circulates in bourgeois spaces. You’re operating in both working-class and bourgeois contexts, and there is a war of position happening there as you stake some degree of agency around how your work is understood. This is tied to how your labour is understood, and that is a kind of workers’ control.

LJS: Thanks so much for connecting the dots. Here’s my position—the working class is forced to sell our labour to capitalists for a wage. There are such things as professional revolutionaries and organizations that build worker-operated structures, but producing working-class culture for the most part doesn’t pay your bills. The question of what is “proletarian art” isn’t relevant if, at the end of the day, I’m still forced to work for capitalists in order to not die.

I become social when I organize with all kinds of workers. The division of labour separates workers by skills and hours, which is a process that deskills and devalues labour. In the culture sector, the belief that art possesses intrinsic social value divides labour between those who produce artistic work and those who manage artistic presentations in a bourgeois context. The contradiction is that the workers who produce culture and the workers who manage the production of culture are both precarious, forming two divisions of the working class who are forced to sell their labour and reproduce capitalist culture. This doesn’t mean that we should indiscriminately organize with all managerial workers, but rather that those in proximity to authority who share similar economic circumstances should develop solidarity with other workers, instead of capital.⁴ My argument is that practicing artists and workers in the culture industry who want dignity and protections for our labour should organize and fight for them. This is a process of becoming coherent as working-class people who can join the broader labour movement.

Workers’ control connects to what I said earlier about controlling your historical context, and where and how my work is recognized since the bourgeoisie write history. It’s also about building alternative economies—a term we’ve discussed in the town hall and working group meetings. It means exactly what it sounds like, it’s an alternative to the bourgeois economy. Alternative economies won’t pay your bills either; in practice, it’s temporary and underdeveloped because being forced to work for capitalists keeps us busy and tired. The “Means of Production” exhibition [the show I organized as part of the collective Lunch Hour] is a working example of how it plays out. When working artists pool their skills, knowledge, and access to space, materials, and equipment, it offers a glimpse of what our collective historical potential could be. In that sense, working-class artists have a role to play. Artists can be duplicitous and a textbook definition of the petite bourgeoisie, and while the class one gets dealt in life is crucial to understand and be aware of, it’s not fixed. 

SHCL: We have talked about a bourgeois aesthetic. A bourgeois aesthetic is facilitated through bourgeois relations, bringing bourgeois sensibilities into spaces where organizing and other progressive ideas are emphasized. Your work seems to develop within working-class relations yet circulate within a bourgeois structure. Within institutions that possess a sense of prestige, you’re emphasizing your relationship to that place as a worker who emerges with an economic analysis of it as a work site. One way a working-class artist can deconstruct bourgeois aesthetics or infrastructures is by going through them and understanding them thoroughly, but what are some ways that you might have tried to model different production or presentation opportunities?

LJS: I think bourgeois ideology is when the press releases say “blurring the boundaries” because it blurs the boundaries of class, and then we get this feeling of being “honoured” by getting collected, curated, reviewed, etc. This follows the logic of pleasing management because you’re just trying to climb the corporate ladder. This dynamic reproduces a top-down structure that drives bourgeois production at these institutions. Why would I try to work with upper management masquerading as a rainbow coalition when they represent rainbow imperialism? Why would you want to be valued by these institutions that are culturally reproducing the genocide and occupation in Palestine expanding to Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria through inaction and silence? This culture is built from the intensified labour, health, housing, and environmental crises unfolding right here, in the imperial core. 

To the question of different models, for “Means of Production” Lunch Hour developed a call for submissions and accepted every proposal we received. Just to be clear—I’m not a feel-good liberal—I tried a collectivized method to figure out where workers are at. Eighty artists or collectives participated in the exhibition, but fifteen artists from the show attended the art workers’ town hall or general assembly program. In the process, I have concretely identified who the workers are and found another fifty workers who attended in the interest of organizing. 

The way I would put it is you can experiment: artists’ film practice and the circulation of that film in public is part of the superstructure, so it’s not the activity that’s going to transform society, but there’s nothing wrong with experimentation attacking the superstructure either. An artist’s practice is also a platform to reach people, and you should use every tool at your disposal. I don’t know if anything I do on my own is revolutionary, but I’ve noticed that if you’re a worker or a member of the masses, you can talk to other workers. I make my collective appeals directly to the working masses, and I know they hear me. 

SHCL: Anything else you want to say to the workers while you’re here? 

LJS: ARTISTS, FILMMAKERS, AND CULTURAL PRODUCERS MUST RESIST AND FIGHT AS WORKERS FOR THE LIBERATION OF THE WORKING CLASS, NOT IN SERVICE OF, BUT ALONGSIDE THE RESISTANCE AND FIGHT FOR THE LIBERATION OF PALESTINE!

Steff Huì Cí Ling 林惠慈 is a cultural worker, labour researcher, and occasional critic and film programmer living as a guest on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ / Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. 

Lily Jue Sheng 盛珏 is an artist/filmmaker, cinema worker, and organizer local to New York City and New Jersey (Lënapehòkink).

1. Steff Hui Ci Ling, “In praise of hockey players on canvas: Artworkers from class division to new solidarities,” ReIssue, November 12, 2023, https://reissue.pub/articles/in-praise-of-hockey-players-on-canvas-artworkers-from-class-division-to-new-solidarities.
2. Paraphrasing a text message from Amy Ching-Yan Lam on October 11, 2024. There are principled exceptions, such as artist Siyan Wong’s “Lives of Three Canners: New York’s Chinese Elderly Immigrants” exhibition in 2023. Astroturfing is a term that refers to something manufactured but fashions itself as “grassroots”’— for example employing activist rhetoric or models to market or sell a commodity.
3. Stom Stogo and Andrew Lampert, “Stom Sogo and Andrew Lampert,” BOMB Magazine, April 3, 2013, bombmagazine.org/articles/2013/04/04/stom-sogo-and-andrew-lampert.
4. Steff has written about how proximity to authority can be a barrier to solidarity between art workers despite shared economic circumstances: “In praise of hockey players on canvas: Artworkers from class division to new solidarities,” ReIssue, November 12, 2023.

This article is published in issue 41.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue