November 8 – 17, 2012
Curated by Siya Chen and He Cong
1256 Dundas Street West, Toronto
Sometimes when you’re far away from home you lose your way. And
when home is split between two places, strangeness and familiarity abound and you
find yourself an outsider looking in on the ‘strange’ rituals of those around
you. You study your environment as if seeing it for the first time. And the old
familiarity that you remember becomes traded in for loss and displacement.
This last week I’ve found myself in a lot of old places.
Most notably, not London. I would dearly love to ‘follow the London art scene’ (and
my heart is indeed there), but this is a moment to revisit old places and lay
new memories, find moments of connection and allow myself to search.
And through the wonders of Facebook and international connections
I came to the artist-run space Gallery TPW for a show of Chinese video artist
Zhou Tao.
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| Chicken Speak to Duck, Pig Speak to Dog |
There are four videos shown on monitors of different sizes,
mounted at different heights. The films range in time from 6 to 20 minutes, and
all depict scenes and people from China. In Chicken
Speak to Duck, Pig Speak to Dog (2005) a group of farmers are gathered together
at night, the green night vision camera documenting their studious recreation
of bird calls. The camera captures the swell of cheeks and pursing of lips as
strange squeals and shrieks fill the darkness. I can’t help but laugh at such a
cacophony of bizarre sounds coming from these serious old guys. I’m smiling
already.
The next video to catch my eye was Mutual Exercise (2009), with its uncanny resemblance to a Jeff Wall
photograph, made even more uncanny by the fact that it was set in China and definitely
not a photograph, but I think infused with a similar sense of highly composed ‘naturalness’.
Here the camera is fixed on a scene outside a building, onto what would
probably be a parking lot. It’s framed by a house on the left side and windows
and balconies above. Two men are playing a strange sort of game where one
directs the slackened body of another into position, only to trade spots and be
repositioned himself. Everything in the image remains still except for the movement
of this curious dance, itself executed with an awkward gentleness. It all seems
so considered, so composed, and for me, this means it holds my attention. I feel the carefulness with which the artist
has chosen and framed this situation. It is highly manipulated, but graceful,
perhaps more revealing than a ‘real’ situation, and introducing a sense of
strangeness to what would usually be an unremarkable setting.
As I watched the longest video, Collector (2011-2012) in the rear of the space, I
started to think that this strangeness of viewpoint was what made me like the
work so much. I did not feel like an outsider looking into an exotic world, but
I felt the artist’s own sense of feeling an outsider in his own ‘familiar’
world. I really feel the position he puts me in with his camera, where I become a silent
watcher of small happenings and ephemeral moments. People are quiet, they move
within their environments with a certain cadence and measure, not unlike a
plant swaying in the breeze. They become beings on whom I look with curiosity
and unknowing.
The video shows everyday occurrences. There are farmers
working, a man walking down a path, torrential rains, a pulsating red
tail light, a waiting man aimlessly knocking metal sheets, the torso of a young
person gently gripped by the fingers of a lover. And in all of it I feel a
sense of equal-ness, as if it all amounts to the rhythm of things on this earth,
where our own motions and struggles are not independent of the environment we
find ourselves in, but another part of the endlessly shifting movement of the
world.
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| Detail from Collector (2011-2012) |
If I were to step into a more critical frame of mind I would
add that I thought the use of music near the end of this video made it all a
little too sentimental. The small tableaus that the artist caught with his camera
started to feel a bit trivialized, and I feared that I would start to see them as
elongated filmic equivalents of national geographic photos.
Indeed, the last thing I’m interested in is looking at and admiring
the ‘exoticness’ of a ‘strange foreign’ land. And of course that would have to
be predicated on me feeling at home in my own, something that evades me
today.
At the end of the day, this work reminded me that even in the strangeness of what
was once a familiar place, my new sense of separateness meant I could see more
than I ever had before. Maybe it is only with a bit of distance that we can really
start to see.
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| Front space at TPW |
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| View of the CN Tower in the grey fog of November in Toronto. |
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| The end of the day. |
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