Chinese artist’s disturbing imagery skewers a modern world out of balance

In 2017 alone, Chinese video artist Zhou Tao had works shown at prestigious art venues and events that included the Guggenheim Museum and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, both in New York, and the Venice Biennale. Next month, the 41-year-old Changsha native will attend a screening of his latest piece, The Worldly Cave (2017), at the Tate Modern, in London, and at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, the following evening.

But before that, Zhou is the subject of a retrospective at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which opened on Wednesday. With its long tradition of holding multimedia spin-off exhibitions in venues across the Dutch city, the festival will not only feature The Worldly Cave, but also five previous titles by the artist, all grouped into a programme called “Zhou Tao: The Time Keeper”.

Zhou has come a long way since his first video short, a four-minute-plus piece called Barking, which was included in an indepen­dent group exhibition held in a residential complex in Guangzhou in 2002.

The Rotterdam showcase is centred on The Worldly Cave, says programmer Julian Ross. “It’s a film with an absorbing, cinematic quality that we really wanted to bring to the big screen,” he adds.

And Zhou says his pieces suit a film festi­val. “The cinema symbolises a ritual where you have to be very focused in both heart and mind, as you sit down quietly and prepare to enter another world,” he says. “At a museum, you look at things as you move along, and it depends on the viewer’s choice.”