Photo | Video | Installation | Sketch |
       [ Video/Single Chanel | Video/Multiple Chanel | ]

< / 23

< / 23

CHEN Xiaoyun Plug 2004 11 minutes Video | Edition of 4 code: CXYU028 / id:7528

There are many fanciful craving in the city, for this is a nest for others; a dejected young drifter appears amongst the fleeting figures in the cityscape, yearning to capture his own shadow in the sky. He muses: “I much rather I am a power plug, with the city being a gigantic socket board, having wires running through the sky.” Everyone is a prisoner with no exceptions. This is a city built according to the model of electricity flow. Each feedback and loop of the electrical wave will serve to delineate its silhouette of twinkling skyline; from an open vista through the thinly diluted suburban air, each expansive breath of the metropolis can be observed to be thriving on the desires of every one of its inhabitants. Rays of dim light shooting past clusters of dwelling are catching the struggling figures down below，the variegated dusk sky is starting to quiver and becoming more and more flickering while the twisting skyline manages to keep its composure despite the burning passions it inhabits. City, is a rearing ground of immense proportion, it relies upon the desires of its people to continue to outstretch its symbiosis needs. He, on the other hand, is simply standing here, ogling at the sky, with faith on the desires that perpetually hang in the distant horizon; he lowers his head, awaiting the onset of another nightmare.

Suddenly, I seem to have slipped into the domain of all those mysterious desires in the sky through the tangles of black and white wires laid out beside me, I can envision an electrical controlled gateway sliding open above my head, within which resides an all powerful overlord who commands all the craving and desires of the city. I pull myself up from the mud pool, crawl along the riverbed to break the surface in the water, as I step off the No.28 bus I slide down the side of the bus stop sign like a drop of morning dew; looking up to the dizzying sky, I can feel a switch embedded in my head that controls the pictures streaming through my mind; up I climb a flight of stairs, before it is time to charge back down another, I eventually climbed up to the top of the tallest building in the city, … waiting, awaiting a ray of light, a flash of lightning… at this moment, my sight is like a thumbtack, it presses itself firmly into the softest spot of the city; I shut my eyes to listen to the prefect synchrony of electricity currents ebbing and flowing through the sky.

Detail pictures: