A Chinese Ghost Story 倩女幽魂
2019-2022
Projector; Video; Smoke
Dimensions Variable
This is a project that revolves around a location in my hometown. After watching the Hong Kong movie "A Chinese Ghost Story", adapted from a story in "LIAOZHAIZHIYI" written by the Qing Dynasty writer Pu Songling, I was attracted to the ghost Nie Xiaoqian, played by Joey Wong in the movie. Bizarrely, one day when my father and I were passing an inconspicuous parking lot in my hometown, he suddenly said to me that this was the place where the "A Chinese Ghost Story" took place. Through my father's narrative, this story, which has always existed here in my hometown but has been obscured for me, crosses over from the narrative space of mass media into the space of my private memory. At that moment, a strange feeling emerged in my mind: the original illusory story of the ghost and the scholar that took place on the screen was projected into the reality that I exist. And I started an artistic practice to demonstrate this feeling.
In the original story, it took place in the north of my hometown during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, and in a map of the Qing dynasty, this location happens to be in the north direction, and now it is a giant parking lot, but strangely enough, although it is currently located in the heart of the city, it gives me the impression that it is deserted.
So I took several walks in this parking lot through the location experience method to gain inspiration, and I tried to analyze the mechanism by which this strange feeling arose when I heard that the story exactly took place in my hometown.It was directly connected to the land of my existence, i.e., my whole life was suddenly enveloped by the the story through my father's narrative. The imagination of Nie Xiaoqian was projected into the air of the land in where I lived, and she became a real ghost because of the connection between the story and the land: a disembodied presence that hovered in the place and people's narratives, the border dissolved. I also found a relevant argument in a paper: this is a narrative straddle that occurs in fictional narratives, and here it is a straddle from fiction to reality.