In Zhou Tao’s (b. 1976, Changsha/Guangzhou) video Blue and Red (2014), a green light reflecting off of a young boy’s face as he sits on the grass is so bright that it could only be artificial. A group of adult pedestrians standing in an open area lit by a LED screen beyond the frame of the video are waving at the screen, unaware that the interactive feature of that device had been broken for weeks. A pile of sandbags fills the screen like an abstract painting with a horizontal composition, while sunlight at a protest site implodes from its brightness a certain shade of blue. Suddenly, the video frame shakes with the firing of a gunshot.
These are some of the images that form the video work Blue and Red, shot in China’s Guangzhou and Bangkok, Thailand. Blue and Red comprises moments captured in multiple sites: the urban city square of Guangzhou, the anti-government protest site in Bangkok, a rusting rural metal mine in Guangzhou that turned more oxidized green by the second. The red thread that links these moments together were people—sometimes on their own, sometimes in groups—enveloped in light coming from different sources, artificial and/or natural. Blue and Red reflects Zhou’s concerns with individual and collective subjects’ relationship to the land, when its purposes expand beyond its provision of natural resources, but also acts as site of resistance, or even, comforting amnesia of some sort, when the abudance of light also signals rapid development, and the comforts it sometimes offer.
In another work titled After Reality (2013), Zhou inserts himself into the routine of summer dragon boat practice of some rural villagers in southern China, following their paths as if he were one of them without their knowing. These images are intercut with those shot in Paris during the winter, inside the city’s gardens covered with frost. This shows another main concerns of Zhou Tao’s practice, which is the interface and entanglement between urban and rural lives in contemporary time, the space between truth and falsity, and the agency of bodies and human actions in situations that are absurd. MW
self-presentation:
From the East Village to Deer Town; from Sukhumvit to Mortal Hole; from Flower City Square to Mars Science Laboratory, why does everything always happen unexpectedly in these journeys? In one green deserted area, and in the climate complicated by summer and winter, I joined the training with the rowers of dragon boats by days and nights. Molecules of soil and gas derived and reconstructed into new compounds, light beams were cast in the fog and then built into a palace on the square. Along the gradation in spectrum between red and blue, I noticed that sleep was going toward a political destiny of the unconscious. I became one resident, in the midst of a topology and lights mutually shaped by the imagery and the reality.
