Cici Peng on Wei Zhang’s 'The Silver Tide' (2025)

We commissioned Cici Peng to respond to Wei Zhang​’s ​‘The Silver Tide’ (2025) as part of our ONE WORK series.

Cici Peng is a film writer and film curator based in London. She is a programmer for Sine Screen, a film collective which exhibits moving-image works by East Asian and South East Asian artists, and specifically focuses on experimental and archive films. Her writing can be found in Filmmaker Magazine, the Financial Times, Film Comment, frieze, TANK, e‑flux among other publications. She is the project lead and mentor for the Queer East Critics Project. She has curated screenings and events at the BFI, ICA, Barbican, Open City Documentary Film Festival, London Short Film Festival among others. She is part of the New York Film Festival’s Currents shorts team.

In Wei Zhang’s ​‘The Silver Tide’ (2025), a line of silent narration appears midway through the film, set against the image of a performer dancing in traditional Miao silver armour: ​“I once heard it said: a seed that has migrated from its native ecology takes decades to naturalise to foreign soil. And even then, it carries traces of its native land.” The word naturalise jars with its political weight. What does it mean to be rendered ​“natural” within the boundaries of a nation-state, and at what cost? The term implies a slow, painful process of assimilation, one that demands self-erasure while it remains impossible to fully erase the difference of one’s Otherness. At the same time, to resist naturalisation is to remain marked as abject, strange, or out of place.

‘The Silver Tide’ sustains this sense of estrangement as it dwells in moments of linguistic alienation, while Zhang’s restless, drifting camera produces a sense of proximity that is at once intimate and withholding. Images rotate wildly, sedimented against one another yet too resistant to settle, remaining just out of reach. They pause only on vignettes of performers that appear to exist on the bounds of time as non-human spirits – between rivers and historical edifices hidden behind skyscrapers. Through this oscillation, the film gestures toward a deliberately opaque rendering of the queer migrant body – one that resists being fixed or fully known, even as it is shaped by overlapping forms of displacement.

In the film, silver is not only a material symbol, but an active participant in producing this specific diasporic identity. It transforms whoever moulds it, wears it, mines it, and circulates it. Silver has long functioned as an intermediary object – always in flux – perhaps most clearly in its role as currency. Identities, for Zhang, circulate as lightly as sixpence coins, as the narrator embodies figures both historical and mythic: the Scottish heiress Lady Margaret Erskine, associated with the silver mine at Alva, and Mother Lou, the matriarchal ancestor of Miao mythology. For the Miao ethnic community, silver is part of a foundational ornamental practice, while the material is also worn to ward off evil. Miao silver heirlooms are shown in multiple forms throughout the film: as a crescent moon necklace rendered in 3D animation, a headpiece worn by a performer. Although Zhang begins by tracing the Miao’s material lineage, they progress to speculatively tracing their own lineage back to the Miao myth of Chiyou – a figure who rose in rebellion against the imperial expansion of the overlord Huangdi, and Chiyou is claimed today as an ancestor and symbol of cultural resistance by minority Miao and Hmong communities. Zhang speculates upon the possibility of a Chiyou identity: one in which Chiyou was never fully subdued by the imperial centre, but instead persists, latent.

Composed of shifting textures, materials, and formats, moving porously between 8mm grain, 3D animation, and digital footage, the film’s malleable form is not just an aesthetic choice, but a strategy that both formally and narratively emphasises the centrifugal force of silver – its capacity to disperse across images, histories, and bodies. The 8mm image is nothing other than silver made responsive to light: each frame a deposit of metallic residue, the trace of a chemical encounter that freezes time. Digital images, too, are the result of the extraction of natural metals. Through a new materialist lens, silver runs through the work as its animating force. Close-ups of ornamental Miao ornaments and Scottish coins recur across 8mm and 3D formats alike, gesturing to the movement of the diasporic body and its myths, but silver also conditions the very possibility of the image, a vital substrate that underwrites the film’s legibility.

The central tension emerges throughout the work: how does one preserve an identity and history that are vulnerable to the erosion of time – especially as one who has left, and who has taken on new myths? By holding multiple silver threads that interweave throughout the film, Zhang draws out the tension between the existence of a singular body, against the multiple forces of history that pull it. Yet the light jingle of coins throughout the film reminds us that a body is not so weighed down, but, like these small objects we carry in our pockets, travels across worlds, bearing an unseen history that continues to circulate.