{"id":8628,"date":"2012-12-06T07:08:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-06T07:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.randian.art\/?p=8628"},"modified":"2023-04-30T16:59:41","modified_gmt":"2023-04-30T16:59:41","slug":"zero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.randian.art\/zh-hant\/zero\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cZero\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cZero\u201d: Zhu Jia solo exhibition<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

ShanghART Beijing<\/strong><\/a> (261 Caochangdi, Old Airport Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China, 100015) Nov 23 \u2013 Dec 16, 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It doesn\u2019t matter at what point one begins watching \u201cZero.\u201d There is no narrative thread (the presence of one would indeed be a surprise in much contemporary video art), no apparent end or beginning, no trigger or closure. The camera is trained always on a single, attractive young woman. She is seen sitting in a sun dress teasing her hair in the breeze, a blue ocean behind her to the left as if to advertise a holiday; slow motion emphasizes an affected pleasure in the experience. The scenery is later rolled away by attendants. Elsewhere, she smokes, facing the camera, against a backdrop of nameless apartment buildings, or walks towards the lens along an unfinished road between concrete flyovers, away from a view of city blocks, chimneys and a cooling tower. A more filmic air is conveyed through scenes in which she is clad in a pleated black dress with white collar, her hair planted in 1950s waves (apparently the go-to guise for non-contemporary characterizations). In this performative attitude, she stands in the dappled light cast from branches onto a wall, or motionless in an anonymous modern stairwell. At one point, she looks at her own reflection in a spot-lit room, as if upon a stage; at another, faces the camera with hair slightly dishevelled and asks (her voice inaudible, the words subtitled), \u201cAre you finding reasons for what you have done?\u201d There are other dislocated pieces of dialogue \u2014 \u201cI still can\u2019t understand\u2026\u201d\u2026\u201cShall we talk about something else?\u201d\u2026 \u201cMy life is not only now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This slow-moving collage of scenes is not unengaging. One has the sense of continuity, yet without sequence. The sensation becomes like a narrative in itself moving vertically, rather than progressing horizontally though time. One is reminded, too, of different ways of seeing. These fragmented scenes appear more like the products of a glance \u2014 spare in content and with almost static compositions akin to photographic shots \u2014 yet they are presented in drawn-out fashion, as if objects of the gaze. Wanting is the depth of curiosity, wonder or pleasure that usually attends this manner of looking, for these scenes are shallow, often frontal and not without vanity, pivoting around an attractive character and carefully crafted views of the sea, a stage or urban vista. The compulsion to continue looking at them seems to stem from this visual and temporal disjuncture, as the expectation of a culmination quickly evaporates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zhu Jia\u2019s work has long been concerned with urban states both social and physical, using video to create pieces that emulate and perpend the multifaceted existence of contemporary cities. \u201cZero\u201d is described in the exhibition\u2019s introduction as emphasizing the gap between the recollection of memories and \u201cthe virtualized construction of today\u2019s reality,\u201d and how this affects one\u2019s judgment.  The marriage between subjectivity and temporality or \u201ctimescapes\u201d discussed in a recent response [1]<\/a> to John Berger\u2019s essay \u201cField\u201d [2]<\/a> is particularly useful relative to video (as a time-based art), and the contemporary city \u2014 the site of multiple realities and successive, glancing interactions not unlike the encounter with digital information. Berger in his essay uses the example of stopping to look at a field, ignoring for a moment one\u2019s own activity and time in order to notice those unfolding within the realm of the field. In so doing, one opens oneself to the possibility of other times, freeing perception from the obligations of response and engagement which so much of contemporary life, flooded with information and stimuli, demands. As such, to gaze upon a specific \u201ctimescape\u201d other than one\u2019s own is a highly subjective act that denies the onrush of the singular time frame of the virtual world. This manner of focusing attention quietly upon some other scene therefore becomes an \u201cexperiment in freedom\u201d [3]<\/a> and a source of self-identification, because \u201cThe fragmentation of attention diminishes the quality of our presence, and we are never fully in one place. Without attention we are lost.\u201d [4]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Might these ideas be applied to Zhu Jia\u2019s work in \u201cZero\u201d? We are also told in the introduction that \u201cthe work reflects an introspective attitude towards the conception of \u2018self.\u2019\u201d Could these strange gazing frames, which arguably offer us little more than would a glimpse,  imply, in the manner Berger suggests, the dissolution of attention, and in turn the effective displacement of the subject. The girl seems rootless indeed, posing and pausing within shots that inscribe fairly generic sites. These are the non-places of contemporary life \u2014 particularly in China, where contemporary cities, having sprung up so fast and in tandem with historical erasure, tend to look much the same.  We cannot place this woman in the frame; her reality is a simultaneous, self-conscious one of different guises and states \u2014 she often faces the camera directly as if appealing to its gaze, always aware of herself  (a reflection of the omnipresent media \u201ceye\u201d) yet ultimately dis-placed, just as the scenes framing her are somehow de-placed, lacking reference or definition. The \u201ctimescape\u201d of the environments she is in might as well be that of the video, spliced and vertical, and without progression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus does \u201cZero\u201d evoke the contemporary city and human subjects at stake within it. It is a reflection which bleeds into the environs of the gallery after one leaves and along the massive roads that strike between hundred-fold apartment blocks in Beijing \u2014 and other cities beyond it. Zhu Jia\u2019s latest work subtly explores the blurring of distinctions between individual and collective timescapes, glimpses of the city, the dis-placed contemporary gaze and the individual subject whom it is no longer able to distract, and who dissolves against its backdrops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> Jeppe Graugaard, \u201cIn the Field of Time\u201d, last modified November 3, 2012, http:\/\/www.redrawingthemaps.org.uk\/blog\/?p=262#respond<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> John Berger, \u201cField,\u201d in About Looking<\/em> (New York: Vintage, 1992).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a> Jeppe Graugaard \u201cIn the Field of Time\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]<\/a> John Berger, \u201cField\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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