Zhou Tao (周滔) | Vitamin Creative Space

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news:

61st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen – 1st Prize of the Jury: Zhou Tao, “Blue and Red”
http://www.vitamincreativespace.art/en/?p=5733

“New Directors / New Films” 2015, co-presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center
http://newdirectors.org/film/new-directors-shorts-program-1

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Sometime, when you observe the surroundings and people around you in detail, you will capture those hidden traces that connect with your inner heart. During these moments, you will forget the existence of the physicality of yourself or the subject; only feelings and ideas are flowing. This is precisely the starting point of a fiction. You are the audience. The existence is objectified and becomes a film or a play. This is my description of the perceptive relations. I don’t want it to be considered as merely a viewing concept.

-Zhou Tao

I experienced a certain moment. I found the same experience in Zhou Tao’s videos Collect or After Reality. The videos offer something far more complicated than what I had experienced in reality, yet I can only use myself as a medium through which to describe these works. In this time-space that is not “either-or” but “both-and”, it allows us to create and enter with our own ways. In the “moments” that we have, time is never cut. Therefore, my experience may just set the “depth of field” for viewing Zhou’s videos. When “we” long to surpass the limited time of our existence, our experiences will start to interact with this world.

We are travelling, not through images, but within a “volume of time”. It is only when the threads hidden within time link with our perceptions, at “that moment”, that existence can be revealed. This is why Zhou Tao does not perform (when you perform, you will be blocked by your own performance), but rather he moves. He moves, seemingly unaware of his own movements, as one “does not enter into communication with the outside world except unawares.”¹ He does so in order to throw himself to this vast field of the world, to follow the footsteps of fate, to wait, to urge for the “revealing” of an invisible existence. But to reveal is not the goal. To reveal, but what for? If revealing equals to intervening and distorting the “shelter” where “existence” hides, all it will reflect will merely be our own confusion and desire. After all, since existence is invisible and silenct, humans have to step forwards, transforming their own selves as the media with which to test its depth. Perhaps it is this “moment of unawares” that makes the elegance of human action possible.

– Excerpts from Hu Fang A Place Where the Spirits Rest, appeared on Zhou Tao: The Man Who Eats Pigeons, published by Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, 2013

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¹Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, translated by Jonathan Griffin, Urizen Books, New York, p 51

(All images: Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Text: Vitamin Archive)