Video Art
462
Artist: Tony Wang
Artwork: Liberated (2020)
Concepts/description:
The video depicts a young dancer who is new to New York City. The work sheds light on the process of realization and self-discovery by exposing the protagonist to an unfiltered version of New York. In the end, the subject is no longer troubled by loneliness and by what she sees. She relied on her passion for dance to accept her environment, to accept herself, and to accept that she is no longer restrained. In fact, the artist is liberated.
Tags: N/A
Duration: 3:54 mins
423
Artist: Alice Zhang
Artwork: Still Buddha(2022)
Concepts/description:
This is an experimental silent short film《Still Buddha》. Concept: The tree desires stillness but the wind will not cease.Things don't occur as people wish. However we keep worship Buddha, praying him to let us see the original appearance of everything.
Tags: N/A
Duration: 3:46 mins
(click the image to watch the video)
Artist: Yi-Hsuan Hsu
Artwork: F.L.Y- First Love yourself (2022)
Concepts: Bathroom is the most private place. It is the space where we can finally take off the mask and attire that we are wearing, and see who we really are. It is the space where we can express ourselves freely at the same time throwing all our negative thoughts in the toilet or washing it off. In the end, we can walk out of the “bathroom” and be reborn.
Tags: N/A
Duration: 2:21 mins
130
106
Artist: ANGELA, LIAN
Artwork: Back & Forth (2021)
Concept:
Back & Forth contemplates the triality between Chinese scholar and designer Lu Xun, my mother, and I. Lu Xun legitimized modern Chinese design by welcoming Western influences into the New Literature and Design Movement. He also encouraged young supporters to study traditional art and remain sensitive to their culture. I see parallels in the way I'm interested in understanding my cultural identity after being exposed to Western influences my whole life. I wish to confront my influences and create new avenues of expression to escape the limitations of liminality in my identity. The voice of my mother ingrained in me recites Lu Xun’s quotes as a way to juxtapose and insert myself into a past historical context. The result is a contemplation of my identity that confronts three individuals: Lu Xun, my mom, and myself.
Tags: Video art; garment; Chinese identity
Duration: 2:45 mins
(click the image to watch the video)
135
Artist: Vincy Wang
Artwork: Blue Dreams in Bath (2020)
Concept:
In Chinese, the mind is translated as "brain ocean." It is calm and completely still, a wet canvas silently reflecting the Sun's daily sermons. It is thunderous waves, a nautical blacksmith slamming stormy bricks of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, crafting a transient landscape. But it is also just water.
Duration: 00:39 mins
175
Artist: Kaede Qiu
Artwork: Exhibition (2021)
Concept:
Brief Synopsis: Providence, Rhode Island. Juxtaposing imageries from a zoo, a specimen lab, an art museum, the ghosts of various “exhibits” gather. Shot with 16mm film, the visions of those who observe and those being observed gradually intertwine…
Duration: 4:00 mins
193
Artist: Chenyao He
Artwork: Trap (2020)
Concept:
Sticks with transparent circle films are planted in polyurethane foam, visualizing the plight of trapping humans in characters and information. Marks and gestures made of unconsciousness on the rounded films are incomprehensible, which is a degradation of language and a rebel to the information explosion. As an insider, the person in the center of polyurethane foam is the symbol of isolation, staring at the outsider who is revolving the circle, holding a strip of films hanging from the sky. The insider looks forward to getting out of the trap. The outsider holding the information strip symbolizes surveillance and siege. On the contrary, as an outsider, a gaze from the outside indicates the sense of alienation. To me, I always feel like being trapped in an abandoned island and being attacked by the overwhelming influx of information. I desire to combine installation with performance art, exploring a new form of contemporary art.
Tags：Installation, Wood sticks, Transparent films, Polyurethane foam, mixed material 300 x 300 x 300 cm Performance art
Duration: 1:11 mins
210
Artist: Yingchen Zheng
Artwork: Eggs (2021)
Concept:
"Eggs" is a film where I intend to capture the entanglement between reality and the world of literature. Delusion, deception, overlap, and foreshadow are what the girl in the video is experiencing. You can decide which is the illusion or the reality: either the entire love story is imagined by the girl while reading Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov, or an actual love affair that shares a similar backbone to the story of Lolita. Therefore it can be interpreted as a conflict between person and self, and also person versus person. Throughout the film, eggs appear multiple times to represent the relationship stages. A whole egg symbolizes a fresh beginning and new possibilities. It brings purity and hope to the world. While a broken egg could embody failed expectations and unfulfilled dreams. As for subtitles, I selected direct quotes from the novel of Lolita to further interlace the two worlds.
Tags: #photoromans#photography#film
Duration: 1:30 mins
212
Artist: Hongyu Chen
Artwork: Dogs in the city (2022)
Concept:
The relationship between urban development and animal living space
Tags：Performance art
Duration: 4:25 mins
(click the image to watch the video)
219
Artist: Xinran Tong
Artwork: Your Puppy (2020)
Concept:
This story is about a girl who suffers from depression. She takes medicines to control her emotions. The puppet is a metaphor that she controls herself to deprive herself of all her emotions, so the clown puppet’s color is faded for most scenes. Compared with the 3-dimensional clown puppet, which is closer to human beings, the two-dimensional shadow puppet is flatter, which represents that the girl’s personality is further numbed. The social environment compels her to impose the emotions not belonging to herself. So you can see that some of the colors are distorted while others are still fading. At the end, we want to show that she’s not the only one who suffered from depression, there are many people like her who suffered the same.
Tags: Experimental Film
Duration: 01:39 mins
218
Artist: Xinran Tong
Artwork: 3 Munites in Chinatown (2021)
Concept:
Chinese students always have a strange and familiar impression of Manhattan's Chinatown, with a language barrier (most speak Minnan dialect and Cantonese unlike Flushing Chinatown) and streets that seem like the streets of the 1990s in China. My friend Zou Jia and I observed these older generation immigrants for three minutes on different streets in Chinatown.
Tags: Documentary
Duration: 3:09 mins
225
Artist: Xiaohan Liu
Artwork: www.search.com(2021)
Concept:
WWW.SEARCH.COM is a multi-channel video featuring participants’ different interpretations and expressions for the same series of emotional keywords that are then edited in search engine mode. Personal emotion, one type of information that is common but also nuanced to convey and express, especially between different race , gender and politics, which often lead and display on the serch reslut based on sterotype recognition and understanding. Here, Liu records participants' facial expressions to express a series of emotional nouns. Though they convey the same information, results vary from each individual. WWW.SEARCH.COM obscures pieces of data and information, complicates what is truth and what is fiction, ultimately encouraging audiences to conduct their own searches.
Tags:Multi-channel, color, video, loop
Duration: 00:41 mins
(click the image to watch the video)
245
Artist: Jie Min
Artwork Name: Noire Lumière (2021)
Concepts:
“Noire Lumière” is a conceptual and immersive project that intends to display what the blind dreamt through a storytelling way. Following the mouse move, we enter the blinds' dream. It's not completely dark, instead, the spotlight guide us to the fanciful world imagined by the blinds. As we embrace the colorfulness that the blinds are not able to perceive in reality, the dream comes to an end, and again we returned to the world of black.
Tags: coding project; video art; blinds' dream
Duration: 3:00 mins
249
Artist: Hailing Liu
Artwork Name: Exquisite Misery (2018)
Concepts:
In some Chinese rural areas, the families of the deceased would hold grand rituals during a funeral. In some regions of China, showing sadness in funerals is a traditional culture connected with Chinese filial piety tradition. Showing misery of losing beloved in a funeral is sometimes considered as attendees’ concern and respect.
Based on this funeral tradition, some grieving families will hire mourners (or “keeners”,”cryers”) for external guidance of ceremonial atmosphere in funerals. Mourners’ job is to do cry performance : they cry as realistically as they can, in order to enhance distress energies, which could also affect attendees’ emotions in the funerals.
Hiring vocational mourner as performative culture in Chinese funerals interests me and inspired me to do this project. I invited my friends and engaged myself as well, to dress as mourners and to perform in crying. Each person were given 20 minutes to sit alone in an empty room, to prepare for their emotional point and then start to cry. In our performances which happened individually, the relationship between so-called authenticity and pretentiousness of distress emotions becomes nuanced and intriguing – We used our own ways to perform but reached to a complicity.
Tags: Multi-channel video
Duration: Duration adjustable
250
Artist Name:Hailing Liu
Artwork Name: Inter-habitat (2017-2018)
Concepts:
In this two-channel video, two documentations were taken from Mt. Bai Yun and Xin Tang Graveyard in Guangzhou, China separately. During my traveling for a project research on funeral, I found the panoramic similarity of these two places from a specific perspective. Mt. Bai Yun is a tourist attraction where people can see beautiful urban sceneries on the top of the mountain, while Xin Tang Graveyard is built on a mountain with huge numbers of tombs. I shot the landscapes of the two by time lapse, to capture their day-and-night switching and make them play in opposite orders.
Tags:Two-channel video
Duration: 04:41 mins
253
Artist Name: Yufeng Wu
Artwork Name: Spectrum (2021)
Concepts:
The project I designed, Spectrum, aims to explore the impact of different colors on the identity of people with different identities. In the pure experience of color, people with different identities can put aside their differences and conflicts and find mutual identity in the balance of color.
Duration: 26 seconds
Artist Name: Yier Cao,Yinyin Lu
Artwork Name: Meet You By the Sea(2021)
Meet You By the Sea Is a utopian surrealism short film. In the film, Merran receives a letter from a distance, depicting the sea she has always been dreaming of. This is a letter to all the fools who dream. May we all find the sea in our hearts one day.
Duration: 3:43 mins
304
305
Artist Name: Lilian Yuan
Artwork Name: Story of Light and Shadow(2022)
Concepts:
The two very different scenes of darkness and light are merged with each other through the movement of light and shadow, when this dynamic and the collision of buildings and objects presents a unique effect. At the same time, the changes of light and shadow can also give people a kind of warmth that brings hope, and can also reflect the process of time passing.
Tags:Architecture, Videography, Light and Shadow
Duration: 47 seconds
329
Artist Name: Xiaofan Jiang & Xintong Tan
Artwork Name: Symbiosis(2022)
Concepts: Symbiosis explores a symbiotic relationship between data and plants through an anecdote at a two girls' apartment. In 2028, scientists have developed a way to turn plants into data servers using external electronic roots and conductive soil without damaging the plants. (Projection mapping and visual effects were used to demonstrate the inner cyber activities of plants. )
The plant-based data storage apparatus signifies a liminal state for plants between a machine and a natural being. And that poses these questions: If your data lives in the plants around you, would you feel the urge to take care of their lives? Would you still treat them as plants, the living beings who are generous enough to spare their capacity to humans, or machines that would be disposed of once failure occurs? Does nature deserve to be dominated by such a human-centric worldview?
Tags: Plant-based Data Storage; Cyborg Plant; Futuristic; Speculative Design; Projection Mapping; Visual Effects;
Duration: 3:01 mins
330
Artist Name: Min Soo Park
Artwork Name: Merlin(2022)
Concepts:
How does man strive to be happy? In the personal portrait of Swiss artist Lukas Krähenbühl, we follow him to understand what makes him happy and come to understand that accepting oneself is the key to happiness.
Duration: 5:23 seconds
331
Artist Name: Mia Zhang
Artwork Name: Voluntary Peeping Contract(2021)
Concepts:
It should be interesting if we transpose people's actions from online social platforms to the social space in reality. People express themselves on social media as they are performing various kinds of monologues. The performance seems to face the chaotic and boundless cyberspace, yet they seem to have a target audience of their own.
Relating to our own experience in digital space, we found a unique property of online social platforms which distinguishes them from the social space in reality. We named this property Public Privacy. In the platform, Weibo, which our discussion main based, the public contents users post are accessible to everyone theoretically. But in fact, only a few acquaintances who usually interact with the publisher will actually receive that information, disregarding the special cases.
It is this feature that gives Weibo users a subtle sense of “peeping” while viewing content posted by other users who they do not regularly interact with; and when their posts are being read, they will also get a sense of “being peeped”, mixing a complex set of psychological activities such as “wanting to be read by someone” but “not some others”, etc.
At the time, we believed that users who are engaged in online social platforms (such as Weibo) were all aware of this feature, whether consciously or subconsciously. Under this awareness, keeping using these platforms is tantamount to agreeing to a contract, that one’s public posted content can be peeped by anyone, and one has the right to peep anyone’s open content. This is also the origin of our project name, Voluntary Peeping Contract.
Tags: Social Media, Installation, Peeping
Duration: 3:00 mins
341
Artist Name: Yan Jin
Artwork Name: Cremeschnitte((2021)
Concepts:
Cremeschnitte is a video essay exploring the dialectical relationship between language, culture and geopolitics, how language is constructed and restructured by culture, as well as how cultural heritage transcends the border and constraints within ethnic or social groups, meanwhile questioning how borderline is drew on map where there’s no physical dividing line. By introducing Cremeschnitte as a metaphor connecting different countries of different backgrounds and becoming a survivor of the turbulent history, the narrative blurs the boundary between fiction and nonfiction.The video not only concerns with the language being a communication system, but also discusses how language, being part of our cognition derived from perception of the world, addresses ones relationship with this outer world.
Tags: border;language;identity;immigration;history
Duration: 14:43 mins
342
Artist Name: Yan Jin
Artwork Name: Maria(2019)
Concepts:
In <Maria> the voiceover is reading a letter that he never writes down, covering the topic of memory and death, time and space, border issues, culture and language, lost and found. I explores the dialectical relationship between presence and absence by introducing a script which blurs the gaps between facts and fiction while digging into the concept of unreliable narrator. The direct use of language contrasts with the lack of image content of the short film.
Tags: border; language; memory; immigration
Duration: 5:00 mins
346
Artist Name: Ge Gao
Artwork Name: Liminality(2022)
Concepts:
The video shows my understanding of the word“liminality”, that is liminalities will constantly appear, and everything will hibernate and change with in it.Through the visual splicing of human daily life, natural replacement and planetary movement, I try to concretize the abstract concept of liminality, expressing that liminality is everywhere and we should learn to coexist with it and try to break through it.
Duration: 3:43 mins
347
Artist Name: Zilu Wang
Artwork Name: Solid-Liquid Coexistence(2022)
Concepts: Shadow produced by light, wild grass lying in spring, smog between the buildings, second-hand blurred snowflake, water-drop on the window, small river under the bridge, space between two doors, and me the witness are presenting the liminality, with thoughts and pride. The shift between a first-person and third-person makes another space. And everything is happened in this space.
Duration: 2:15 mins
359
Artist Name: Shanshan Zhang
Artwork Name: The Foam(2021)
Concepts: The foam is a 16mm black-and-white experimental short film.
It’s about the beginning to the end of an intimate relationship. They kill part of themself to fit in the illusion, it turns out just reflection and memory, fleeting beauty and eternal loneliness.
Tags: 16mm Film; Experimental short film; Intimacy
Duration: 4:43 mins
361
Artist Name: Yuxuan An
Artwork Name: O PHILOI, OUDEIS PHILOS(2020)
Concepts:
This work represents a doomsday carnival after an epidemic. I liken international students to “American Chinese food”--a product in the context of the Western world. Therefore, I combined the differences between Chinese and American cultures to create ridiculous dishes; for example, the inspiration for long noodles hanging on the wall comes from Longevity noodles in China that are usually eaten on birthdays for health and longevity. In the audience's interactive process, the reaction towards the dinner gradually augments the sense of absurdity.
Tags:Medium: Chinese Jelly, Red bean, Chinese brewed beverages, Cheese Shrimp dumpling, Chinese seasoner, Rice, Vegetables.
Duration: 04:45 mins
388
Artist Name: Ted Zheng Wang
Artwork Name: Dear Pennis (2022)
Concepts/description:
In infinite proximity and infinite separation, dear penis, what is it？
This film uses the perspective of the penis to explore more possibilities of intimacy.
Duration: 3:18 mins
396
Artist Name: Niuyue Zhang
Artwork Name: Bele (2021)
Concepts/description:
“Belé” is an experimental music video for an instrumental piece named "Belé" composed by a rising Peruvian composer Alvaro Balvin Benavides; it's also a multimedia immersive experience that intertwines contemporary dance, installation, visual effects, and cinematic production design. The creators of this film intended to expand the possibility of merging different forms of experience and explore the stimulation of multiple senses -- visual, auditory, and tactual.
The world being inundated by chaotic elements of the contemporary cultural industry, we as artists often feel entrapped by the consumeristic aesthetics and converging values. Thus as visual and auditory creators, we find it crucial to be inspired by nature; and reflect upon the relationship between the human body and the cosmic matrix.
In Belé, memories of inter-galaxy travel undermine the relativity of "close" and "far". Ascending by the cliffs signifies our natural nostalgia for the ocean matrix ---- The extraterrestrial elf gazes softly at the long-estranged mother earth.
Tags: Experimental, Dance, Multi-media
Duration: 4:00 mins
431
Artist Name: Yichen Wang
Artwork Name: Sand and Foam (2021)
Concepts/description:
This video intends to show a sense of softness and discuss the conflict between being free and being in love. Text excerpt from Sand and Foam by Kahlil Gibran.
Tags:Digital, love, free, slave, moon, star
Duration: 1:05 mins
457
Artist Name: Tony Wang
Artwork Name: Restless (2021)
Concepts/description:
With the restrictions of going outdoors and with socializing in general, our imagination and emotions have become increasingly more tactile. ‘Restless’ examines an emotional journey as the protagonist’s mind travels through a series of mental landscapes, yearning for hope and freedom.
Duration: 2:57 mins
458
Artist Name: Tony Wang
Artwork Name: Flow State (2021)
Concepts/description:
'FLOW STATE' is a visual keyword hodgepodge to showcase New York City’s fast-paced and disorienting way of life. The piece focuses on constructing an alternate reality view of the subway location by using camera blurs and movement, thus creating a liminal space for the viewers.
Duration: 1:06 mins
459
Artist Name: Tony Wang
Artwork Name: Yunnan - The Unveil (2020)
Concepts/description:
The piece is a symphony of visuals, ambient sounds, and music. It unveils the daily lives of Yunnan, China in parks and outdoor markets, the natural beauty of the province, and its religious side. Traveling is a spontaneous experience, therefore I structured the video so that each scene transitions to a different vibe - from the bustling markets to the quiet countryside (sometimes unexpectedly) - to make the audience experience Yunnan the way I did, as my friend and I rushed from one location to another without fully grasping what we saw.
Duration: 4:59 mins
460
Artist Name: Tony Wang
Artwork Name: Kindred Bodies (2021)
Concepts/description:
Shot in one-take, “Kindred Bodies” is a representation of the delicate relationship between vulnerability and empathy. The characters use dance to communicate their feelings as they become a part of each other. This piece seeks to encourage us to share our inner emotions with others and to be in touch with our feelings.
As director Dziga Vertov once beautifully personified film cameras:
"I'm an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I'm in constant movement...my way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.”
Inspired by Vertov, I wanted to take advantage of the camera in constant movements to show the art of dance from a new perspective. Dance is a 3D medium, like moving sculptures. Yet, a dance performance is viewed by people from a single and static perspective - either from the seats of an auditorium or on the floor of a dance studio. When looking at sculptures in a museum, we can physically walk around the object to observe it. The film explores what effects the same viewership would have on a live dance performance that is free from immobility.
Tags: Video, One take
Duration: 2:41 mins
463
Artist Name: Tony Wang
Artwork Name: Metamorphosis (2021)
Concepts/description:
The process of acquiring inspiration and its “metamorphosis” from the inception of an idea to its transformation is developed through transitioning seamlessly between three scenes (stages). Inspiration arises in spontaneous ways, and it comes in different shapes and forms that only take place at a specific moment. The anti-gravity rise of the liquid in the first sequence is a glimpse of inspiration caught in a moment of epiphany that cannot be replicated. The rest of the project follows the fluid as the beginning of visual stimulation to trigger a stream of emotions.
Tags:Autodesk Maya, 3D animation
Duration: 00:53 seconds
477
Artist Name: Chengtian Yu
Artwork Name: Neuro Stuff (2021)
Concepts/description:
Neuro Stuff is an experimental time based media piece created in late 2021. The video will be looped and projected on the wall, preferably in a dark ambience. It is about a therapeutic practice fighting against neurodermatitis, a disease which causes my scalp intermittent or constant itching. By attaching the paint fragments on back of my head, surrounded by the ever-changing “halo”, I find the process to have somewhat soothing and comforting effects. Also, it is a method suggested by my psychiatrist to relieve the itchiness by imagining the irritated areas into something having entities. That is said, the paint becomes a representation of my skin affected by the disease. Moreover, paint fragments used in the video are dried leftovers from my palette paper. They are carefully peeled as well as arranged, transformed into a condensed essence. In my eyes, those collages are the most genuine portraits of internal free-willed personality, and it is so-called “the use of uselessness.” according to the Taoist ideologies. The paint shards’ close-up scenes in time parallel the cyclical pattern of Taoist conceptions of nature and the cosmos as constantly evolving through stages of growth and regression, clarity and void. Neuro Stuff intends to create a meditation space that temporarily breaks from reality by getting lost in poetic imagery. The scene of the paint trying to go down the drain suggests the slow-motion of the eye’s movement while browsing through the flowing paint. Color and form’s pervasive equilibrium often add to the sense of space, while they act so improvisationally and unrestrained while spontaneously makes the settled dimensions collapse. Overall, the strong contrasting colors from the work tend to augment the blossoming impression, creating an overall thrilling effect of dividing the grasp of scale. Audiences’ subtle cognitive reflections are led by illusion-like and optically complex coloration arrangements.
Tags: Looped video projection
Duration: 3:07 mins
494
Artist Name: Nichakorn Masunthasuwan
Artwork Name: Autorefractor Test Simulator (2021)
Concepts/description:
The piece is named ‘Autorefractor Test Simulator’. It is an imitation of a regular auto refractor eye test one may find at the ophthalmologists, except the balloon at the end of the road is replaced by a blurred image of a moving doll. I wanted to create an unsettling plane that has horror implications, the conversation between the two eye lens build suspense and tension. This piece was made as a record of this sudden idea I had.
Tags:Video Art, Animation, Collage, Eye Test, Adobe Photoshop, Experimental Collage
Duration: 0:22 mins
498
Artist Name: Yunxi Lu
Artwork Name: The Gulp (2021)
Concepts/description:
A boy incidentally finds a small creature lying in the forest and starts imagining all those happy lives with the small creature afterward, yet after the small creature wakes up, all those imaginations disappear.
Duration: 1:52 mins
502
Artist Name: Zixuan Zhang
Artwork Name: Breathing (2021)
Concepts/description:
In Breathing, a plant-like object blooms and collapses with the inhale and exhale, continuously in a transitional state between blooming and closing. This is one of the works in the artist's exploratory collection, Mantra. The collection starts with an analysis of religious text, through which an artistic typeface is created using burning plastic. The choice of material symbolizes the evolution of the human relationship with the universe through history. Each leaf of the "plant" in the video is morphed from a letter in the previous creation. In this circular motion with no end, the artist seeks to ask: How do we and our surroundings perceive and reshape each other?
Duration: 01:17 mins
(click the image to watch the video)
509
Artist Name: Chantal Kassarjian
Artwork Name: Plugged (2018)
Concepts/description:
We follow the story of Mr. X, who has been deeply affected by the weight of ever evolving technology and the pressure to keep up from a young age. This manifests as a growing headache which affects his daily routine to the point where he takes a pill to counter the pain. The clumsy pill travels to his brain and accidentally makes things worse, or does she?
Tags: Digital Cutout Animation
Duration: 03:29 mins
529
Artist Name: Peiyun Chu
Artwork Name: A note to New York City (2018)
Concepts/description:
As a foreigner, an anybody. The feeling of living in New York. No matter who you are, what role you play. New York will always be sincere and accepting of you.
Duration: 2:28 mins
547
Artist Name: Oliver Hua
Artwork Name: Can you see it? (2022)
Concepts/description:
"No appearance", a famous Buddhist viewpoint, means that the Buddhist way is beyond all visible images. The moral of the Buddha without a phase is to admonish people not to cling to the Buddha, not to cling to the phase, and to learn to let go and accept in order to understand the true meaning of life. Buddhism is an important part of the Asian culture, and I have always enjoyed working on subjects from history.
Duration: not exceed 10 minutes. can be in loops
(click the image to watch the video)
562
Artist Name: Yizhi Liu
Artwork Name: I am stuck
Concepts:
If Emoji is an accessible universal language, then Memes in a region are a local variant of this universal language. They require users to have a higher understanding of the regional
culture. In addition, the internet is updated very quickly, and the update of emoticons is also speedy. These two points prove that memes can aggregate the mass psychology of a certain period and a particular region. The internet also has memory. This piece uses a lot of memes, short videos from China, and videos I shot myself to tell the story of the protagonist feeling stuck in a repetitive life in a playful and witty way. The image information forms intermittent narratives in a fragmented form. When the audience hears the monologue and sees the subtitles, they can spy on the psychological activities of the protagonist, even if the
protagonist does not appear on the screen from beginning to end. When text and images are
combined, two kinds of information transferred from different forms are incorporated into
another new layer of information. I chose the form of 360-degree video to provide the
audience with a world with only virtual images, text, and sound and no realistic environment.
This piece is like a meme with a duration and a storyline, in a playful way of telling a mentality of "I thought I was stuck."
Tags: 360 degree video
Duration: 05:32 mins
566
Artist Name: YIzhi Liu
Artwork Name: The 11th nail (2021-2022)
Concepts:
Lie down (Tang Ping) is a lifestyle choice that is almost a social protest movement. In China, young people reject societal pressures on hard work or even overwork. Another word describes this kind of overwork environment called the “996 working hour system.” It derives its name from its requirement that employees work six days per week from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm. Young people are in a low-desire and indifferent attitude toward life. They describe their lives as "I don't want to stand (do more work than I can) or kneel (beg others for better treatment), so I have to lie down (do nothing)." A lot of Internet terms were also born. And this mentality is not unique to China.The Internet has flattened the world, as a Chinese in
New York, the public sentiment also influenced me on the Internet. When I saw a government encouragement advertisement using Internet language in the subway of my hometown (Shenzhen), I deeply felt the irony. Shenzhen is a unique city. It is a particular economic reformer city in China. 79.8% of the permanent population are 15-59 years old. The average age of the resident population is only 33 years old. In such a young city, the country's response to the negative state of its people has offered no real help and more of a sarcasm. I collected real stories from people around me and combined them to create a new one—a fictional personal story in the form of a vlog and a monologue. The work explores the boundaries of contemporary video art while not choosing the conventional video art narrative mode.
Duration: 07:10 mins
571
Artist Name: Jiara Sha
Artwork Name: hear it from far away(2022)
Concepts: Always intrigued by motions and movement, I have been collecting footages of organic movement discovered in daily like for months -- including the plastic bags swaying on the branches; waves pushed and being pushed; sands popping upward in the wind, etc. I composed those footages together after a while from the time it was shot. Where does this motion feel in your body, where does this motion bring you to emotionally?
Duration: 6:00 mins
628
Artist Name: Robin Xie
Artwork Name: Aquarium (2024)
Concepts/description:
As I watched the water pass by, my throat involuntarily choked. Sometimes I fantasize that I'm a goldfish, maybe that would make breathing easier?
Tags: experimental film; diary film; goldfish
Duration: 3:01 mins
589
Artist Name: Ruoyu Zhang
Artwork Name: Napa Apparatus(2021)
Concept: *in the photos
Duration: 16:44 mins
(click the image to watch the video)
591
Artist Name:Ruoyu Zhang
Artwork Name: Sepπ(2021)
Concepts: *in the photos
(click the image to watch the video)
635
Artist Name: Ruoyi Shi
Artwork Name: Letter from Fish (2021)
Concepts/description:
Inspired by the first Chinese peasant revolt, I place the "talking fish" that appeared 209 B.C. in a contemporary context to discuss propaganda, fabricated facts, and how information is carried, manipulated, interpreted, and transformed. To convince people to support this uprising, the leaders placed a message inside a fish belly to pretend a prophecy. Somehow, the human-made words became a revelation after traveling through the fish's stomach. The fictitious belief contributed and led the uprising to a temporary victory.
This story was once required for Chinese students and was deleted from the textbook in 2019, the same year when protests in Hong Kong raised global attention. I set up interactive site-specific installations, traveled in the city, and documented my journeys and encounters with the fish. I invent various versions of the original story by providing multiple perspectives and translations, as different interpretations expand the map of my alternative reality.
Tags: performance, ceramic, fishing crank, ink on silk.
Duration: 5:37
651
Artist Name: Xibei Jia
Artwork Name: Disease And Web (2021)
Concepts: Disease and Web, a stop-motion animation animation based on a real story happened on a girl in 2020 when coronavirus disease just exploded in Wuhan, China. The girl was attempting to reach out for help on her social media account, because her father was experiencing the symptoms of coronavirus when the hospitals were all occupied, but the most feedbacks she received were questioning the authenticity of her story. During the process of saving her father, she continuously received cyberbullies. In the end, she sent out her last words on the internet: " He is gone. What can I do?"
Tags:Covid-19, Stop-motion Animation, Video Art
Duration: 3min5sec
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656
Artist Name: Mallory Mallory
Artwork Name: Butterfly Dream (2021)
Concepts: This 3D film explores Qiu's sense of division and shuttle as a bicultural artist. The butterfly in the dream travels freely through space and time, just as for Qiu, only in dreams can portals from both worlds appear at the same time. The butterfly is given different identities and meanings in different cultures, but because it is a butterfly, it can move freely. In an era of information explosion, it's hard to escape the echo chambers, but whether for Qiu, it's the fragmentation of cultural identities that allows her to see both sides of the world exist at the same time, and the portals are open for her.
Tags: Experimental 3D Film; Surreal; Bicultural Division and Portal
Duration: 1 min 24 secs
570
Artist Name: Renpei Geng
Artwork Name: Dark Swan Lake(2019)
Concept:
The struggle and rebirth of three ghosts under an 18th century global epidemic.
Tags: Physical drama; Butoh; Gothic
Duration: 11min
714
Artist Name: Shuohan Xi
Artwork Name: Hypersomnia(2021)
Concept: *in the photos
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602
Artist Name: AILING LU
Artwork Name: Silence(2021)
Concepts:
This is a video of the daily life of Chinese international students in the United States, inspired by myself and friends around me. Expressing exhaustion, insecurity, confusion, and loneliness through silent filming.
Tags: film-recorded video
Duration: 03:28
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134
Artist Name: Sihan Cui
Artwork Name: Lulu(2019)
Concept:
Lulu lives with her mother Feifei in Flushing, a Chinese immigrant neighborhood in New York. They both are visually impaired because of serious eye disease. A few years ago, Feifei brought her daughter Lulu to New York from China to seek medical help for Lulu’s eyes——Lulu is still a child, the family is still trying to seek some hope. In the days in New York, they struggled to survive in a completely new environment. Feifei started a massage career to support their life. However, she found it’s hard to work full time while taking care of Lulu. She had no choice but to quit her job in the massage parlor and put the massage table at home for the clients who occasionally came to her. Although the mother and daughter work hard to survive, these incomes are far from enough for high medical expenses and living expenses. They have to depend on the father who works in China, who also, is vision impairment.
When I entered Feifei and Lulu's small apartment, space was strangely divided by a piece of pink cloth. On one side were Feifei’s massage table and tools, and on the other side was where they live. That’s their living room, dining room, and bedroom. Lulu likes school life very much. She always repeats the paragraph in the textbook again and again with a happy voice. When Feifei works on one side, Lulu reads out loud and writes with a special typewriter on the other side. They chat with each other across a piece of cloth. The struggle of life seemed to have no place in this small space. In the continuous dialogue and laughter between Lulu and Feifei, the sun goes down soon.
And tomorrow will be a new day.
Tags: Documentary short film
Duration: 03:09 mins