Where are the found stories in a world of constant surveillance? Installation artist Xu Bing pits this watching world – 10,000 hours of found footage from 28,000 cameras across China uploaded to the cloud – against simple melodrama, young love and fragility. The story is read into an embroidered quilt of clips where time clocks spin at random. Even as we deal with a new narrative, the backgrounds fascinate us with their mosaic of materials already watched.
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Where are the found stories in a world of constant surveillance? Installation artist Xu Bing pits this watching world – 10,000 hours of found footage from 28,000 cameras across China uploaded to the cloud – against simple melodrama, young love and fragility.
The story is read into an embroidered quilt of clips where time clocks spin at random. Even as we deal with a new narrative, the backgrounds fascinate us with their mosaic of materials already watched. [hkiff.org.hk]
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Each of us is captured on surveillance cameras, on average, 300 times a day. These all-seeing ‘eyes’ observe a young woman named Qing Ting (her name means ‘Dragonfly’) as she leaves the Buddhist temple where she has been training to be a nun and returns to the secular world, taking a job in a highly mechanized dairy farm. Ke Fan, a technician working on the farm, falls in love with her and breaks the law in an attempt to please her. On his release from jail Ke Fan looks for Qing Ting again, without success – until he comes to think that she has reinvented herself as the online celebrity Xiao Xiao. But Xiao Xiao slips from her pedestal, and Ke Fan resolves to reinvent himself as Qing Ting. Written by Tony Rayns
