Mirco-Landscape II in the process

General Description:

In Micro-Landscape series II (微观山水2), I will continue a series of installations related to landscapes, which mainly borrow from Chinese ancient stories and project them onto two types of models: In the first model, I will copy the shape of the New York Times’s building and project it as a landscape video onto multiple spaces of the model; in the second model, I will use concrete as a material to copy an apartment’s home appliances that everybody uses such as refrigerators, electronic fans and washing machines, and project these videos into different sizes and shapes.

Scope of Work:

Micro-Landscape Series I, (微观山水1) projects a digital animated video onto two sides of a carved concrete cube. All of the characters’ outlines are carvings that depict each part of the ancient painting: Ma Yuan’s master piece, Xiang Ling Tu, shows an old man retired from the royal court, sitting on the edge of a mountain, playing his zither. Suddenly, something strange happens: a bird flies and lands on his shoulder, then tells him to leave the human world and go back to nature. In the video, all the aspects are part of a family- the old man has a connection to the landscape, he can call the bird and the bird responds. This series recalls the ancient philosophy of humans’ relationship with nature; but by using new materials and technologies in the animated video, this Series provides a transition from the original Song Dynasty’s paintings to a broader context.

In the Second Series, the theme of families and nature continues but in the contemporary context: nowadays, urban people enjoy the countryside on the weekend, but they no longer take the time or have the patience to observe nature. With the rise of the digital age, people take for granted the use of cell-phone cameras to capture nature in their daily lives. In the video, time is not important, but in the real life of the Chinese, time is money. The Second Series borrows resources from the home: families rely on home appliances for saving time, so the animated video recalls nature within real products used in daily lives.