The Shoplifters
2024
This conversation begins with a discussion on Joe Wakeman’s feature film, The Shoplifters. A video artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
Full interview click HERE.
Full interview click HERE.
Situated within an extended pedagogical encounter, this conversation develops from a student–teacher relationship grounded in trust and articulated through the reciprocal exchange of knowledge and lived experience, taking Joe Wakeman’s film The Shoplifter as a point of departure. Spanning ideology, philosophy, activism, and politics, what originates in the art school is reconfigured here as an ongoing dialogue — where the meanings of words and symbols are negotiated, destabilized, and reconstituted. Amid a contemporary culture abound by life-threatening nihilism that cuts across race, class, gender, and nationality, as what follows, the conversation unfolds as a form of spiritual communion through the possibility of healing. What emerges is a shared commitment to imagining futures, embodied not only in thought but in their action, in their habits of being.

Credit: Visual identity for the film, The shoplifter, featuring Artist Hanlei Wang’s editorial narrative design.

