Final Video
“The soul exists not, everything takes only a physical form. True. We are composed of the very same flesh served on our dinner plates. True.
The soul exists and is attached to one’s body. It cannot leave and survive independently. True.
The soul exists and can be enticed away. True.
When the soul tentatively steps out of the body. It sees a rosy world.
Where every notion swell larger than itself, the woman swelling out of the man, green out of grass, and you out of me.
Blue gently flows out of menacingly-red apples, blue sea waves, blue peace, blue death.
Orange out of the inevitable: like the cat’s narrow dodge from a hurtling truck, like the soul’s secret steps away from your body, preserving itself forever.
And purple out of the earth unreplenished by human will or the sun; it flourishes by eating itself. One grape eats another and that makes three. “
—Shuwen Fang (Special thanks to my friend writing this poem to for my short film.)
Brief Explanation
-This video has included elements from my culture, where each fruit represents a symbolism of a meaning from China. What I wanted to show abstractly in the video is a life of a human being. The red apple stands for ‘peace’, the orange stands for ‘luck’ and the grape stands for ‘ success and abundance’. Those are also three key elements that are known and mention in our life. Our life is created and included these three elements to form our daily. ‘Peace’ is what we wish for and stayed in, no matter is the country or reading a book in a quiet and peaceful place. Also, many people mention ‘luck’ in many ways and in our life we need luck as well. Lastly, success and abundance’ is our final goals or achievements or even knowledge, it is defined by ourselves what is successful and what abundance have you gained. Moreover, if you hear carefully, although there is wave washing sound in the video, after a while you will hear that it is like heartbeats. The start is the beginning and the end with monochrome color represents the end of the cycle.
Process
Reflection
I chose to do video because I want to continue exploring the field of performance art. Moreover, I believe it is hard to show the movement in an analog way, the video really can produce many elements like sound. One thing if I can improve is that I would clear the wave sound more precise, therefore there won’t be any wind sound blowing towards the microphone. Also, I might be thinking more about the installation, where I can put the fruits from the video in front of the screen since the fruit already decays, it also represents death or the end of the life; which is also interesting to see in the installation.
