South Stone
2011 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
Zhou Tao
For over five months, Zhou situated himself in an underdeveloped village surrounded by the high skyscrapers of Guangzhou to produce South Stone . Interweaving footage of a village’s landscape, residents, and animals with his seemingly absurd interventions with the place, South Stone indicates the equally incoherent social reality. Fluctuating between documentary and fiction, the film catalyzes alternative connections in time, and the emergence of imaginative spaces. Zhou’s practice alchemizes the ordinary surroundings into a theatre where he superimposes and interchanges the background and the stage, the viewer and the actor, the fact and the story line, the documentation and the representation. His camera is not simply a recording apparatus but an extension of existence, which requires active participation. The images it produces are not just detached spectacles: They are the agents that reveal the theatrical details suffused in mundane life.
Artist Zhou Tao has a diverse and varied practice, and notably, he denies the existence of any singular or real narrative or space. Depicting subtle and often humorous interactions with people, things, actions, and situations, Zhou is known for his films that invite us to experience the multiple trajectories of reality; what he calls the “folding scenario” or the “zone with folds.” For him, the use of video is not a deliberate choice of artistic language or medium, instead the operation of the camera is a way of being that blends itself with everyday life. In his work, Zhou connects seemingly disparate milieus, turning his attention to often ignored sites that exist on the threshold between the natural and the artificial. The visual narratives merge different spatial constructs such as landscapes, the metropolis, construction sites, parks, public squares, and wastelands.
