Film & Video (Film & Video)

Untitled (Celestial Motors) is a visual meditation on an icon of modern urban Philippine life—the jeepney. This ubiquitous form of public transportation, originally built from U. S. military jeeps left on the islands after World War II, is normally exuberantly painted and personalized. They are known for their crowded seating and kitsch decorations, which have become an omnipresent symbol of Philippine culture.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This film refers directly and fictionally to one of the first media dramas: the burning of the Zeppelin aircraft LZ 129 Hindenburg as it landed in New York in 1937. The power of these images, which were widely diffused in the press, had a profound haunting impact on people’s consciousness. This mode of transport – both futuristic and obsolete – crystallizes a collective imaginary which was fed by cinematic, literary and mythological fiction as Barthes would put it.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Plane is an inflatable sculpture in the shape of an aeroplane made from numerous pieces of plastic bags assembled by an iron. The object is inflated by a fan at the structures base and deflates when it is deprived of its power source, causing the plane to sink. It is in this process that plane leans on its wings, evoking a crash, a defeat, or a failure.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the eight-channel video installation Movement , Li Ming uses his body as a prop to interact with different means of transportation. Each channel features footage of the artist moving forward, jumping between various modes of transportation that weave in and out of the frame in a carefully orchestrated choreography. As the artist descends from the loader bucket of a moving construction tractor, he jumps onto a skateboard which he then discards as he lays on top of a suitcase that continues rolling forward.