Beyond Geography

2012 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

23:09 minutes

Li Ran

location: Beijing, China
year born: 1986
gender: male
nationality: Chinese
home town: Hubei Province, China

In his video work Beyond Geography , Li dramatizes the role of the artist-as-imitator to the point of sheer parody. Dressed to toe in the costume of a typical Discovery Channel adventurer-explorer, the artist dashes suavely through the uncharted jungle habitat of a primitive tribe. Li modulates his own voice in laughably accurate mimicry of the dubbed Discovery Channel protagonist familiar to Chinese viewership, daringly gulping fresh water from a river, expertly admiring exotic vegetation, and whimpering in fear of the dark sounds of the night (screaming, even, as he trips on a human skull) in an full-scale exaggeration of a nature show personality. None of these settings, however, is shot on “location” as the video takes place entirely in an empty 3-D digital film studio with a blue screen. Engaging in a near Brechtian conceit, Li deliberately keeps the studio space raw in order to remind us that these television programs are always deliberately artificial and produced. His project is entirely farcical, and just as there are not sets or props to lure the viewer into complacency, Li’s interactions with the indigenous tribesmen – whom Li “discovers” – becomes their own simulated performance of colonial appropriation and meetings of “first contact.” This narrative of appropriation carries throughout until, near the video’s end, Li (in full explorer persona) begins to make declarations about the tribe’s civilization, decreeing their cave paintings (never seen on camera) as masterpieces on par with Picasso and Mondrian. In assuming the guise of the pedantic academic, Li ends his video with a humorously condescending twist. At the same time, his video reminds us of the inherent dangers of confusing mediated representation with documentary while reminding us of the constant threat of cultural appropriation at play when we fail to see the blue screen for the the jungle and the artist for the explorer.


Li Ran produces video, installation, and performance-based works that examine various states of parody and simulacra in the digital world. Through performative narrative, reproduction, mimicry, and satire, Li Ran’s work straddles the line between fact and fiction in playful explorations of the meaning and making of truth. Li describes his own artwork with the language of architecture: that if an artwork is like a room, its meaning should be open and porous, not forced against a unilateral interpretation. This virtual-minded analogy is fitting, as Li’s practice increasingly hinges on the exploration of the non-reality within reality.


Colors:



Related works featuring themes of: » Appropriation Art, » Art and Technology, » Art in Art, » China, » Chinese

RMB City: A Second Life City Planning 04
© » KADIST

Cao Fei

2007

Since 2007, Cao Fei has radically focused her work on Second Life, an online space that virtually mimics “the real world” and includes everything from the expression of ideas to economic investment...

La Town
© » KADIST

Cao Fei

2014

Cao Fei’s video La Town, 2014 depicts a mythical metropolis that has been destroyed by unknown forces...

The Simpson Verdict
© » KADIST

Kota Ezawa

2002

The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history...

Collective Memories: Beijing Hotel
© » KADIST

Chen Shaoxiong

2007

After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...

A Gust of Wind
© » KADIST

Zhang Peili

2008

In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...

Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road
© » KADIST

Lin Yilin

1995

For his action, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road , Lin built a brick wall on one side of a busy main street in the city of Guangzhou...

Vanishing Point
© » KADIST

Xiaoyun Chen

2014

The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...

The Crime of Art
© » KADIST

Kota Ezawa

2017

The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...

Island
© » KADIST

Kan Xuan

2006

In Kan Xuan’s four-channel video Island , a series of objects like nail clippers, hairbrush, toothpaste, and house decorations are shot in close-ups...

Tremble
© » KADIST

Jiang Zhi

2009

In the video installation Tremble, Jiang projected the life-size images of seven naked men and women onto seven individual screens...

Unregistered City series #1 #2 #7
© » KADIST

Jiang Pengyi

2008

Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water...

Regard Eating Every Single Time as a Formal Declaration, My Stomach is Sexy out of Anger
© » KADIST

Xiaoyun Chen

2006

The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...

Paper Tigers…from a whisper to a scream
© » KADIST

Juan Capistran

2012

The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...

21 Ke (21 Grams)
© » KADIST

Sun Xun

2010

Sun’s animated film 21 Ke (21 Grams) is based on the 1907 research by the American physician Dr...

Drag
© » KADIST

Xiaoyun Chen

2006

In the video work Drag, a man in a dark room pulls on the end of a rope...

Mythological Time
© » KADIST

Sun Xun

2016

Sun Xun’s lushly illustrated, dynamic short film Mythological Time is a dreamy chronicle of rapacious industrial development, the mythical qualities of state propaganda, and the constancy of change, as experienced by an unnamed coal mining town...

Pleasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh - 3
© » KADIST

Yang Zhenzhong

2012

Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...

Ink Diary
© » KADIST

Chen Shaoxiong

2006

After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...

History of Chemistry I
© » KADIST

Lu Chunsheng

2004

A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...

Paint, Unpaint
© » KADIST

Kota Ezawa

2014

Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...