“…Ten thousand apologies
My wind-chapped beauty
Pray for your ill-starred man”

-Wang Ping, Small Boat

British artist/filmmaker Isaac Julien’s film installation Ten Thousand Waves has toured the planet for a couple of years now, with previous engagements in Miami, Shanghai, Sydney and London. Now on view at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the visually lush and cinematically gorgeous hour-long film projects across nine screens arranged around a large gallery. Each screen partially obscures another so that viewers are unable to take in all vantages at once, and have to move around the immersive space.

As an art movie, Ten Thousand Waves connects three vague narratives with stylized and interwoven vignettes. First there is the tragic death of twenty-three Chinese migrants gathering cockles in Britain’s Morecambe Bay in 2004. Second, viewers meet an ancient Chinese goddess named Mazu presiding over the safety and fortune of fishermen. Finally appears Julien’s take on a classic 1930s Chinese film, The Goddess, acme of Shanghai’s cinematic golden age.

The grandeur of landscape, seascape and cityscape emerges as the film’s only satisfying theme. When Julien juxtaposes scenes shot in Guangxi province’s remote bamboo forests with the forbiddingly gray North Wales Sea or the bustle of contemporary Shanghai, the majesty of these moving images—a beautiful mountain vista or an elegant high-rise at dusk—is richly incongruous with the dread of death at sea evoked elsewhere. At one point, all nine screens cut to a turbulent ocean surface seen from above. The thought of ten thousand waves is moving in its modesty (compared with the infinite quantity of waves that have moved always without ceasing), but Julien’s soundtrack and odic narration push this tension to a surfeit of moody melodrama.

Strikingly, the project boasts a star-studded cast of Chinese collaborators, including famed actors Maggie Chueng and Zhao Tao, artist Yang Fudong, calligrapher Gong Fagen and others. Poet Wang Ping contributed a commissioned poem as well. With China emerging as a new center of the art world and the focus of much critical and commercial interest, Julien seems eager to graft his work onto the trend, which isn’t really a trend but a country. In an overt attempt to avoid the appearance of exploitation, the contributors’ bios are talking points in much of the exhibition literature. The effort cannot help but appear all wrong, as if the fear of being labeled Orientalist stigmatized Julien’s other artistic concerns. For example, when Gong Fagen is filmed writing characters with brush and ink on glass, the allusion to Paul Haesaerts’s documentary Visit to Picasso 1949 is silly and conventionally boring.

Similar weird moments prevail throughout. Occasionally Julien splices in black and white footage of Communist marches through Shanghai that look obligatory and unnecessary, like shorthand politicization. Elsewhere, Julien films Maggie Cheung as the white-robed goddess Mazu floating around in front of a green screen, attended to by a production crew. This vignette tries to deconstruct the magic of filmmaking, but it looks ridiculous instead. I felt bad for thinking of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon until later when my companion confessed that he was also reminded of the twelve-year-old blockbuster.

The comparison seems unfair (yet here we are), but Crouching Tiger presumably had no qualms about being a very entertaining movie, whereas Ten Thousand Waves aspires to all manner of pretensions that ultimately fall short. All this raises an unfortunate question: how does an artist tackle an issue as broad and as complicated as globalism? Julien doesn’t seem to know right now.