Presenting:
Directional Protection, HD video, 16’04”, 2018
About the artworks
This piece is about foxes in Asian culture, Chinese and Japanese fox lore.
I’ve been collecting stories about foxes. In China, I gathered two references to foxes, one in the Yi Jing, one in the Shi Jing. A friend told me a story about a fox possession in his village. In Japan, foxes have a different status. They are the messengers of Inari, an important Shinto diety. Fox statues are everywhere, guarding shrines and places of business.
Directional Protection began with a video of a fox, slowed down by my friend Z’EV, and something I read at a temple in Kyoto about a special way of traveling to avoid bad spirits.
In the late Heian period, the Imperial family and aristocrats had the custom of not traveling directly to their destination. Instead, they traveled in an auspicious direction to a stopping point where they stayed overnight. From there, they could travel to their original destination, this time in an auspicious direction.
I organized this video by imagining a Japanese fox who is charged with traveling from Kyoto to Shanghai. He is diverted to a small village called Qiuzhuang where he inhabits a woman for many years. Finally, he is able to travel to Shanghai where he explores the alleys of the city. In the end, he flies to New York, where he overhears a discussion about foxes in the Yi Jing and the Shi Jing between two Westerners trying to unpack the meaning of foxes in Asian culture.
About Ellen Zweig
Ellen Zweig is a media artist and writer. She has been working in film and video since the late 90s, creating videos and video installations. Since 2007, she has been working on an homage to the documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens and his last film, “Une Histoire du Vent,” filming as Ivens did in China. From 2007-2013, she documented Z’EV’s concerts, collecting and editing materials for the feature length video, “Heart Beat Ear Drum,” her first documentary feature.
