HIGHLIGHT｜CURATOR’S PICK

On the Road doesn't film anyone in particular—only the ordinary walk residents of Dongming Public Housing take every day, leaving home and coming back. The footage is layered and diluted until no single figure is recognizable, yet all of them feel familiar. Installed right in the ground-floor hallway they pass through daily, the work means that, at this very moment, you might be brushing past your own silhouette from some earlier day.

Artwork Description｜

Starting from the doors of the apartments in the Dongming Public Housing, the artist followed the residents and recorded the scenes between their homes and destinations. These routes imply a switch between work and life, a testimony to their children’s coming of age, or a network of their social interaction. These daily routines and the scenes along the way reveal the residents’ lifestyles and life trajectories.

This work integrates the moving images of the residents’ leaving and going home. Their routes are superimposed by the extracted images and diluted into the collective memories of their movement on the way, therefore evoking a strange feeling of déjà vu. On the one hand, the images created the spatial impressions that have never overlapped in real-life scenes. On the other hand, the artist compiled the interviews interlaced by the participants’ vicissitudes of life, migration and memories, so as to tell the history omitted from the images. On the Road is presented in the hallway on the ground floor of the public housing. From these superimposed, fuzzy, transparent and colorful silhouettes, the viewers seem to meet themselves and relive their memories on the road.