An artist looks back on his younger years at the Chongqing Art Academy in the turbulent 1990s. The selection and demands used to be killing. He was close friends with two boys and a girl. They fought with local youngsters and tried to give each other pep talks. Parallels with the childhood years of his parents, during the Cultural Revolution, also show violence and gun battles. Semi-autobiographical, with motion capture.
The Adventure of Liang Liang is an animation project which has been completed by my team in 7 months. I used many original drawings of my son as the concepts and resources of the animation. This animation is not only the encounter of the worlds between the adult and the children, but also the dialogue between father and son.
I am trying to use a microscopic narrative to sample and magnify the seemingly entirely unrelated cases of Chongqing Steel and Windows to the World for visual analysis. As I see it, the polluted smoke created by the factory is the smoke of modernization mythology, or maybe the fog of history and reality…. These manmade landscapes have obscured the pursuit of collective modern ideals in pre-socialist China and the painful price paid and hard lessons learned. The massive steel town is the stage for collective sleep paralysis and the march of history. Among the crowds that flow ceaselessly through Windows to the World, it is hard to cover up the massive changes that have been wrought on every Chinese from their faces to their souls by the crazed materialistic pursuits of the post-socialist era.
