Same Old Crowd

2016 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

5 minutes

Li Ran

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

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.


Colors:



Related artist(s) to: Li Ran » Biljana Ciric, » Carol Yinghua Lu, » Hu Yun, » Zhang Peili, » Anton Vidokle, » Boris Groys, » Huang Ran, » Josef Dabernig, » Liu Ding, » Nástio Mosquito

Lift with care
© » KADIST

Hu Yun

2013

This research-based artwork acts as a memorial to early twentieth century European exploration of China...

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...

AUTOTROFIA
© » KADIST

Anton Vidokle

2020

Shot in Oliveto Lucano, a village in the south of Italy, AUTOTROFIA (meaning self-eating) by artist Anton Vidokle is a cinéma vérité style film that slides fictive characters into real situations, and vice-versa, to draw a prolonged meditation on the cycle of life, seasonal renewal, and ecological awareness...

A Year · Marx
© » KADIST

Liu Ding

2018

A Year · Marx by Liu Ding consists of a piece of silk onto which a poem about Marx is printed using inkjet...