Presenting:
Yuan Xiaopeng, Untitled, 2-channel video, 2017, 5’17”
Hu Di, Portrait, single channel video, 2017, 37’01”
Hu Di, Contact, ingle channel video, 2015, 9’51”
text/Paul Han
Yuan Xiaopeng uses digital cameras and smart phones for his art creation. Untitled is his first practice on video art. All the footage is shot by iPhone, which are seemingly meaningless daily life debris. From a waitress who’s wiping the dining table, to a piece of paper tumbling on a working escalator, then ripples on a glass rainshed, all these clips don’t have an internal connection. By positioning the 2 channel side by side (one landscape view, one portrait view), the portrait view on the left side is playing in advance of time of the the landscape view on the right side, which makes the same content chasing like two voices.
“People always trapped in the categories of different styles. They start to think about what styles should they use, even before doing. I don’t think that everything needs to be categorized into a certain style. A style also means lots of limitation.”
Deadpan Photography
I’ve talked to Xiaopeng about Post-Internet Art. We agreed that everything will eventually getting worse and worse, or even corrupted completely after they become so easy to access. Now photography is in this mode. From expensive cameras that only a very few people can afford, to now that everyone can “snap” a photo by using smart phones, and then post them on social media to get more likes. This is the result when photography becomes so easy to access. This is what surely will happen.
As a sub-genre of contemporary photography, “deadpan” becomes so popular amongst youth by internet and the rise of youth subculture, which as a result, has made “deadpan” almost everywhere and excessive.
Deadpan photography devoids of emotion. It simply exists as a subject and photograph, but void. By using this aesthetic, it completely detached from the subject that they are shooting, which the words ‘indifference’ will describe the photograph perfectly.
The subject is usually in the center of the image, and the artist is looking at the subject exactly as you’d see it in real life. The color of deadpan photographs is commonly de-saturated. While not completely devoid of color, the colors tend to be muted.
Irrelevant & Relevant
In the video Untitled, there are a sequence of irrelevant clips, which are recorded and collected by Xiaopeng. By compiling these fragments together, the artist showcasing randomness and absurdity of modern urban life.
At the beginning, a waitress is wiping the table with dish soap. By wiping the dish soap in circular movement with a rag, she created a Starry Night – like picture on the table. The conversation in the background between the customers and waitress are about ordering food and hotpot, which seems detached from the scene. A contradiction was built on the surface of the table, when hotpot and Starry Night meet.
In the third clip, you can hear the noise of jigsaw, but in the landscape view, it will take some time to figure out what it is being sawed. The gap, the holograph surface, and the little pieces of debris “floating” on the surface due to the vibration on the board, all the holographic colors present a millennium feeling, which is colorful, cheap, plastic, environment unfriendly, but only to entertain the senses.
Glossy and shining surface are common subjects in Xiaopeng’s photography, including glass, glass façade, screens, and windows. These objects work as a separator in real life, but also work like a piece of canvas in urban culture, since many things can happen on it. Those surfaces are the interface between human and artificial objects.
In the fifth clip, a black line divides the image into 2 sections, the right section with ripples and the background raindrop noise remind you that it is a rainshed on the right side and a glass façade on the left side. The 2 different kinds of glass show abnormal colors due to the rain and natural lighting.
In the 11th clip, a plastic bag was blown up in the wind but a little rock pressed on it and made it wouldn’t been blown away. The zebra-striping and the timer sound indicated that the scene was in a intersection of some roads. In the coming clip, it is also a scene happened on a road, where a big drill was drilling downwards with water worked as cooler and lubricant, which as a result, formed some ripples. And the water theme appeared again in the next clip, where a waterfall was pouring down in a frame of 3 metal chains that divided the image into 4 sections. And by “coincidence”, the 3 horizontal chains dialogued with the 3 horizontal zebra-striping on the left screen.
The next clip presented a front gate of a famous clothes shop and its LED screen. The close-up shooting on the LED screen and using of smart phone causes noise and Moiré pattern (which looks like ripples and waves). Outside of this typical symbol of consumerism, 3 water tanks are displayed to contain the dripping rain from the top. Ironic contradictions were created: a representative of urban mass production and commercialization vs an old school way of “solving” the leaking problem. Then, the drilling scene appeared again on the left, parallelly, the leaking on the right and the ripple on the left conceive an absurd outcome.
In the last clip, the glass table reflected the LED screen next to it, again, noise and Moiré patterns occurred. The high saturation, high contrast image and the triple surfaces (LED screen, glass table, marble floor) all simultaneously playing the same content, which gives the viewers a dizzy feeling. The background soundtrack was from the original venue, which is a symbolic style of overly cheerful and upbeat musak, creating a stagy, fake, amusing atmosphere. All the elements orchestrated a stereotypical Asian urban culture, which could be described as “overloaded” or “excessive”, also appears quite often in cyber-punk artworks aesthetics.
Another LED screen exposed on an apartment building façade. The building is isolated in a relatively deserted area, with grey sky and artificial mountain, binging the audience a post-apocalypse perception, as if it is a post-nuke world, where the authority’s mechanism are still running to propagate the happy and peaceful life, due to the previous program on its own. The wind noise in the soundtrack overlapped with the consequent clip where a piece of random fabric was being blown in the wind on a metal fence, which made the fence shadows morphed to the rhythm of the wind.
De-contextualization and Re-contextualization
If you regard Xiaopeng’s photography objects as a symbolization on daily mediocre, then Hu Di’s video works here are totally the other way around. His art creation could be regarded as a mediocre-ization on cinematic symbols.
As a cinema scholar, one of Hu Di’s recent research is to study the symbols in cinema. Portrait and Contact could be viewed as a collage book of the eponymous content.
Portraits is a clipbook Hu Di gathered and collected of 51 different scenes where “portrait” appear, mostly from the Golden Age of Hollywood movies. In these scenes, a portrait is a tool where it makes the communication unidirectional rather than multi-directional: the role doesn’t show up, but appears in a portrait either in an oil painting or a photo, which made the observer able to avoid the face to face interaction in reality, so that the observer can express his/her real emotions, fears, admiration, etc., which is almost impossible to do so in real social situation.
The functions of the portraits are to create the “presence” by the “absence” of the role. Usually, a lyrical and emotional music will appear in these scenes, and follow up with the observer’s facial close-up, to hype and emphasize the inner emotions.
When Hu Di collect the 51 scenes in an archival way, he basically de-contextualize the original films, made each scene last only few seconds and compiled simply like meaningless materials, as if it is a cinematic way of pop art installations.
Similarly, Contact has used this methodology too. Hu compiled 22 scenes of movies from the 1970s Chinese cinema (mostly from 1975 and 1976), intensively showing the handshaking scenes. In the last two year of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese films were still filled with propaganda, ideology, and grandiose plots. Under the guide of socialism realism, the positive role need to follow specific rules about how to position themselves, how to do lighting, how to show facial expression, and how to manage different camera angles. The plot and content were no longer significant, but unnatural characters and “correct” film language took over the place.
Breaking away from the political and social environment, these movies now would make audience feel awkward and cringe. Amongst those handshaking scenes, they usually showcase how role A is expecting role B, and B appeared “unexpectedly” which cause the tension and resulted in a handshake, saying something stagy about hope with a strong sense of revolution. They usually happened in factories, farmland or working fields, which the handshake will also influence everyone on-site.
De-contextualization and Re-contextualization have made Contact and Portrait possible: same theme being repeated forms void, it made excitement no longer exciting, sadness no longer sad, but only Sisyphus style misery remained.
About Artists
Yuan Xiaopeng, born in Jiangxi province in 1987, graduated from Jiangxi Normal University, majored in oil painting. Yuan now works and lives in Shanghai. He uses cameras and smart phones as his current main art creation. In 2013, Yuan established Shanghai-based self-publishing studio Same Paper, which has organized events & exhibitions revolved on photography and self publishing from time to time.
Hu Di, born in 1982, in Zhejiang, China. He studied Chinese Literature at Zhejiang University before going on to study cinema at several universities in Paris, France. Upon returning to China, he became a freelance film critic and a film scholar. He started making short films in 2014 after attending the Workshop ‘Labour In A Single Shot’ curated by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki. Since then, his works have been screened and exhibited in major international art events such as Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Festival for Expanded Media, 8th Cairo Video Festival, Dallas Medianale, Filmideo 2017 in Index Art Center, Newark and 13th Athens Digital Arts Festival, etc.
