The Fountainhead Residency
Artist’s Statement
Situated somewhere between photographic portraits, cinematic landscapes and home
movies, my recent films and drawings construct histories and address a false nostalgia.
Common throughout is a sense of displaced time. The films are often not linear,
sometimes standing almost still, behaving like photographs or paintings. Time is a
tangible cloud hanging over the narratives. Subjects in these spaces are presented as the
self in multitude—fragmented, mirrored and distant—never quite graspable yet seemingly
familiar. A stripping-down occurs; there is minimal dialogue and landscapes are vast and
isolated, even within urban spaces. Filmic visual language and editing is used in an open
way, creating a time and space that is unbound and escape easy containment. The video
installations further build and superimpose different layers of time onto each other. The
drawings act in parallel to the films, also dwelling in these in-between spaces,
representations of images that feed and interweave into the films. The relationship
between the films and drawings is a necessary, fluid and generative one.
My personal history is often a starting place for ideas, and it ties in with the more
universal phenomenon and sense of displacement, a theme central to my work. The
examination of my own Chinese identity is an inlet to the larger complexities of cultural
realities, especially when represented in art. I have chosen time as a medium, my films
focusing on subtle shifts of time and space to expand coordinates of the possible. It is
precisely the odd departures from the familiar that hold my interest. I look at many
examples of senses of time in cinema—how reality can feel unmoored while the structure
is very much grounded. My working process starts with making graphite drawings
depicting imagery from personal and found photographs, my surroundings and the sites
of the film locations.
My proposal for the Fountainhead Residency is two-fold. My practice relies on perpetual
momentum of interrelated research, film shoots, images, drawing, editing and thinking. I
rely on moments of stillness to harvest ideas and generate from this stew. I would use my
time at Fountainhead to focus and produce from this process. Additionally, I would like to
engage in new research in the form of photographs, drawings and filmmaking on site at
Fountainhead and its surroundings.
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