British filmmaker Isaac Julien has just opened the Shanghai exhibition of his nine screen film, Ten Thousand Waves, an enquiry into the dangers of aspiration and emigration. In the process, he not only became the first foreigner to have a solo show at ShanghART, he also managed to get Maggie Cheung to step back in front of a camera.

In 2004, 23 emigrants from Fujian Province died doing their work picking cockles in England’s Morecambe Bay. This disaster became the impetus for Isaac Julien’s latest film.

“They were actually working in England legally, working under very severe conditions and it was those conditions that led to this tragedy,” Julien says. Despite playing by international customs’ rules, the cockle pickers lost their lives by attempting to better them.

“When I first made this project it was called ‘Better Life’, and when I realised it was the theme of the Expo I had to change it because I’m interested in the more poetic aspect, rather than as a slogan,” Julien says. “Not to aestheticise these problems, but I’m interested in – well, I’m interested in the blues.”

“When I first made this project it was called ‘Better Life’, and when I realised it was the theme of the Expo I changed it. I’m interested in the more poetic aspect, rather than as a slogan”

Julien looks not unlike a blues man as we speak. After a long, hot day installing and tweaking his work, trying to preserve the depth in the video’s whites, he has undone his top button and loosened his skinny black tie.

Ten Thousand Waves braids together three separate, desperate stories. As well as the Morecambe Bay disaster, the work references the 16th Century Yishan Island myth, and recreates scenes from The Goddess, a film shot in China and released in 1934.

The Goddess is about a prostitute who struggles to support her son, hiding money from her pimp so they can leave Shanghai to start a new life. When she finds out that he has stolen her money she kills him, ends up in jail, and asks a friend to tell her son she’s dead. Like the Fujianese in Morecambe Bay, her aspirations end in a death of sorts. Julien alludes to the film subtly, working with be-qipiaoed actress Zhao Tao to recreate some of its scenes on the Shanghai Film Studios lot.