Zhou Tao, After Reality

 

Join us at Bar Laika for a screening of Zhou Tao’s After Reality (4:21 minutes, 2013), presented by Nikita Yingqian Cai.

Shot in Guangzhou and Paris, After Reality is characterized by its translocal ambiguity. In the abandoned, suburban areas located between cities, people plant trees and vegetables, mixed in with weeds and shrubbery. Under the intercity overpasses, wildly overgrown vines and vegetation have completely covered dilapidated walls and tightly wrapped themselves around the land. In a river that has almost been flooded by water hyacinths, a group of Dragon Boat rowers start their mornings with physical training. While the concealed, imperceptible traces of time reveal themselves as riddles, impromptu assimulation with the environment were at times enacted in proximity of the daily reality. 

Through bodily improvisation and editing, the temporal-spatial narrative of the film becomes misleading, as if the winter Paris and subtropical Canton swapped seasons and were located at the same latitude. With the human bodies merging with the disappearing nature framed by urban infrastructures, Zhou Tao challenges the subject-object duality by revitalizing the rituality of vernacular actions.

Zhou Tao was born in 1976, and currently works and lives in Guangzhou. His works have been selected for group exhibitions including Tales of Our Time, Solomon R. Guggenheim (2016), South by Southeast. A Further Surface, Guangdong Times Museum (2016),New Directors/New Films, MoMA & the Film Society of Lincoln Center (2015), On/ Off, Showcases China’s young artists, UCCA (2013), and the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj, the 5th Auckland Triennia and the 7th Shanghai Biennale. The Worldly Cavehave been presented in IFFR 2018, Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou. He is a former resident at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, and has been awarded the First Prize of the Jury of the Ministry by the 61st Oberhausen Internation Short Film Festival (2015), the 1st Han Nefens Foundation BACC Award for Contemporary Art in Asia (2013), and the Asian Cultural Council fellowship (2009) among others.

Nikita Yingqian Cai is the Chief Curator at Times Museum, and she curated the solo survey of Zhou Tao recently. She has been awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2019 and is co-curating the exhibition “Neither Black/Red/Yellow Nor Woman“ with Xiaoyu Weng at Times Art Center Berlin this September. 

For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.