“The Most Abstract Paragraphs”
2021-2022, 4K single-channel video with colour and sound, 39min06sec
The video fictionalizes a private dialogue between two writers in the “fallen areas” during the 40s in China. Nevertheless, their topic is not limited to the 40s (around the time when the Speech at the Forum of Art and Literature in Yan’an took place), but also connects to the self-criticism within the left-wing literary community, as well as the internal discussion anxiety that had long existed since the Enlightenment in the 80s. The two writers, played by “actors,” are scornful of the old literary style of the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” school, but are incapable of entering into a specific position of the new “Yan’an” period. As soon as a definition is clarified, they turn back to fix its carved-in-stone and rigid texture. Intermittently, they satirize or console each other. I guess this illustrates the scene where we talk with our mind filled with hesitation, where the intense context of this dialogue keeps circling internally, unable to be expressed, with barriers abound. The contradiction does not simply represent a binary opposition between globalist and localist experience, but rather the universal circumstance of creators’ individual experiences within the context of historical norms.