MICRO-LANDSCAPE 微观山水

Day and night,

The earth or heaven,

I sense noise,

You are enlivened.

Just ahead a second,

At the next corner,

To meet you all of a sudden,

I want peace,

You want depression.

If the soul can sing,

If the world knows to ponder,

What do you want?

Elegance or crowding? 


- by Lin Zhang

Micro-Landscape (微观山水) projects a digital animated video on two sides of a concrete cube. The images depict “mountains of the soul” appropriated from Xiang Ling Tu, a masterpiece by Ma Yuan, a painter of the Song Dynasty. Here the viewers see an old man retired from the royal court, sitting on the edge of a mountain, playing his zither. Tired of life, he is confused and dejected about the future—not only his own, but that of the world. 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.

Micro-Landscape continues to disturb the visual surface of a Chinese masterpiece landscape by breaking it into two sections. In the video, sounds emphasize the experience of nature: using Max to create a random patch to play nine sounds recorded from nature produces a sensory, suggestive effect that contrasts with the highly realistic small bird painted with great beauty and intensity. 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.

Nowadays, urban people enjoy the countryside on the weekend, but they no longer take the time or have the patience to observe nature because they take their computers with them. Moreover, they do not really look at nature from the heart, and they do not really see. 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.  

prototype,2009