In 2011, a scene: while traveling as usual between north and south on a highway during the season of rice harvest on the boundless Jianan Plain, the reflective ribbons flying in the wind that were tied on by farmers to scare off birds and keep them from eating the rice gave me an abstract experience through their glistening in the strong sun. Even though we know they are functional objects with a purpose, their functional meaning and the beautiful play of light on the surface of the images become subtly connected. It is only after the explanations are removed that images appear real between virtual and actual.
There is a delicate relationship between everyday reality and the referenced reality. Looking at a certain scene, the artist undergoes an abstract, emotional experience, like light refracted by a crystal. The initial image experienced and the refracted crystal-image are not the same. As the films are played in a continuous loop, a powerful pull is created between the two kinds of images. From the perspective of such experience, fragments from everyday life cause reverberations. The images are endowed with a kind of expressiveness, making them more autonomous and pure. This exhibition features a three-channel video installation, and a single-channel video that continues in the vein of Agency of Reality from 2007-2008. They explore the subtle ways in which the experience of “movement” has changed in the contemporary digital society, such as driving to a certain place in real life and accessing the virtual world created by satellites and information by moving the mouse with one’s hand. Combining a projector, images reflected by the mirror and the projection of virtual images, the new three-channel video work touches on the idea of the “crystal-image” discussed by Deleuze, in which the artist makes the virtual image indistinguishable from the actual image.
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