Same Old Crowd
2016 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
5 minutes
Li Ran
The four-channel video installation Same Old Crowd departs from the documentation of an unknown city and takes place in an ambiguous temporal and spatial frame. Twelve characters (amateur actors hired by the artist) appear in black-and-white in highly stylized surroundings wearing patterned cloths. The identities or time period of the characters, all deprived of languages, are impossible to determine. Punctuated by staccato sounds and fast camerawork, the protagonists’ exaggerated expressions and emphatic gestures create a high level of tension. For the artist, repetitions in the video do not attempt to level notion of “difference.” Rather repetition is antithetical to the notion of novelty within the discourse of reality, modernity, and media. As such, Same Old Crowd recalls the artists’ earlier video Beyond Geography and can also be seen as a type of anthropological theater intersecting with performance studies.
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.
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