What does this Chinese video art pioneer’s disturbing new work in Hong Kong mean?
‘A Day’ by Zhang Peili is a 12-minute, 360-degree visual onslaught meant to resemble the interior of our own social-media-saturated minds
The walls of Tai Kwun’s F Hall Studio have come alive with a 360-degree visual onslaught stitched together by eight projectors.
During the 12-minute video loop, viewers are subjected to a thoroughly disorienting montage of first-person footage that shifts abruptly between banal and disturbing.
The imagery is a relentless stream of contemporary consciousness: a nondescript city viewed from a hill, jerky footage of people being pushed in wheelchairs at great speed, a cacophony of television news broadcasts mixed with surveillance camera film.
There are scenes of people running through a park, stopping only to read out the same series of seemingly meaningless numbers. Close-up shots of pedicures and body massages are interspersed with the colder intimacy of medical imaging, juxtaposed against repetitive shots of people in wheelchairs manoeuvring through tight spaces.
After an insipid sequence of a sunrise seen through the viewfinder of a digital camera, the video comes to a shocking finish. In a dark void, empty wheelchairs are dropped from a great height, crashing loudly to the ground and shattering into fragments.
It is a violent, visceral ending that reverberates throughout the enclosed space within the former Victoria Prison, in which pink, 3D-printed models of broken wheelchairs have been placed on the floor – debris from a virtual act of destruction made tangible.