No World
2014 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
18 minutes
Fang Lu
No World is an action-filled video work filmed inside an abandoned museum in the Songzhuang area outside Beijing. Without using any dialogue, Lu created an artificial scenario where she instructed actors with a list of tasks to gesturally mime scenes from news and journalistic images outside China. Through an intuitive self-trained mimicry, these acts simultaneously became moves in a game as well as a daily routine. No World points to the changing roles of the camera from a device originally invented to memorialize a moment to a tool that situationally creates an event. The performance of violence, conflicts and human relationships in the confined space blurs the boundary between the gallery and everyday life, between staged performance and documentary footage. The work is also a metaphor for a desire in today’s youth to go beyond their controlled, mediated environment and perform chaos in order to heighten their existential awareness.
Fang Lu uses intimacy as a place for self-expression in her videos and draws out mundane moments from everyday life as a strategy to heighten one’s awareness of existence from the rest of the world. Instead of using the camera as a tool to document or capture, she stages a superficial experience, or “situated reality,” that locates the self in relation to a relationship, environment, or idealistic notion. For example, examining behavioral patterns of being in love or being sequestered in an empty building with nothing but circulated online images. For Fang, there is no one reality and everyone creates her own reality. Thus, her practice is an ongoing exploration of self-awareness and seeking realization of truths within experience, and the content in and direction of her videos are directly influenced by her immediate and living environment.
