In her latest 3-D animation video The Greatness, multimedia artist Zhou Yi takes the viewer to hell and back. Using visual references from her previous works inspired by Dante's The Divine Comedy and featuring samples of unpublished tracks and melodies from the archives of Italian composer Ennio Morricone, the atmospheric new work is both beautiful and haunting.
'I wanted to reproduce a dream or a nightmare sequence. The soundtrack also helps to enhance the message I want to deliver ... the kind of feeling, which is going to hell and then back, so that was the idea,' the 31-year-old artist says.
The Greatness, which will be shown at Contrasts Gallery in Shanghai next month, is part of Zhou's ongoing investigation into the themes of death and the afterlife, topics that are considered taboo among the Chinese. She believes that only by confronting the unknown can the fear of the inevitable be overcome.
Zhou began creating a series of video installations and sculptures five years ago, based on her interpretations of paradise, purgatory and inferno. What drew the artist to Dante's masterpiece - written in the early 14th century about a man's journey from hell to paradise - is not only the poetic writing but the universality of its themes.
Zhou says she is fascinated by 'the idea of death, the idea of fear and the idea of how we imagine our lives after death' because they are fertile ground for her imagination.
French philosopher Jacques Derrida's Apories, a book she had reread in the past year, fuelled her interest, especially the fear of death: 'It describes the idea of death and ... when we think about that notion, the idea of why we are scared of that.