A KIND OF PERFORMANCE — Thesis Exhibition

​​​The music slowly drifted through the cold. The story unfolds through the music of Tao, an elderly band leader, portraying the lives of the elderly in northeastern China. It all takes place in Ziwen's hometown, Jinzhou. This place has been forgotten amidst China's rapid development and even abandoned by the younger generation. What is life like for these elderly people in their cold hometown?
The work includes two parts. The first part is a photography exhibition, displaying portraits of elderly people and the landscape in the northeast. The second part uses collected moving images to create an experimental installation with various media expressions. The same footage is presented through three mediums: the artist, the system, and the audience's emotions. Different media allow the audience to move through the space...

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The summer of 2023, when I returned to my hometown, inspired this interview. It had been five years since my last visit, and my hometown had become both strange and familiar to me.

The economy in Northeast China is developing slowly. But I've found that places, where the economy grows more slowly, can preserve more of their past culture and character.

Before my interviews, I thought what I would see was a group of elderly people persistently gathering every day to sing old songs, which I believed held some spiritual significance. However, after my interviews, I realized that what Uncle mentioned most was, "I don't know what else to do, so I go to sing and perform every day." This was quite different from what I had expected.

But now I thought, isn't this exactly why the Northeast is such fertile ground for culture and the arts?