Z Z Z

Variations on a Branching Sea

Variations on a Branching Sea is a project that began in 2021. It began as a multimedia writing project initiated by a story of a female protagonist in the Pearl River Delta region.
The protagonist in the work is an imagined Woman. She is a migrant worker who is constantly moving from short- term service gigs around the Pearl River Delta region in China. Throughout the story, she will encounter different creatures, artificial beings, plants, stones, clouds, and gods. She eventually works for these living and non-living entities as a service worker in the gig economy. Through her migratory labor, viewers will be able to look at the sea and the surrounding areas in the Pearl River Delta through her eyes. She finally arrived at the sea but the omni- present sea from her memories had already been stirred up by human beings. It was no longer an unreachable area.

This fictional worldbuilding weaves a combination of local folk customs, myths, beliefs, news, and geographical elements of the Pearl River Delta region. It looks at the phenomenon of migration and labor in the context of globalization. The artist hopes to engage with this untouchable reality through the power of building new fiction. Flow and migration are central themes of this work. We have been fed the dreams woven by globalization only to be woken up to its failures by the Covid 19 pandemic, the normalization of its effects, and the rise of conservatism throughout various parts of the world. Maybe it’s a chance for us to rethink these themes and weave a new web of interrelations between the self, our relations to other people, other entities, and the worlds in which we inhabit.

“She took a 40-hour boat ride to see the monkeys. The monkeys are very shy and flexible. It’s not easy to see this mythical beast, it’s all about their mood. They also like to play hide-and-seek with us like children. It is said that the more you see them, and the more you look into each other’s eyes, the better your luck will be in the coming year.” The “monkey” in the work is an image generated by the generative adversarial network using artificial intelligence. TA acts as the image of the gods in the story of the project. They lurk and roam in the online world, multiply and grow, and also spread the concept of gods in the spiritual world. . It can be said that this is a mathematical creature, a model life that grows in regular soil. Artificial life has no entity, but it exists and continues in the same way as living things. In other words, living things are just carriers of some kind of model life. Even non-living things, atoms, and molecules are constructed to follow specific patterns. Living things and non-living things, material and non-material things can be viewed in the same amount here, annihilating the other and the self.

The “monkey” obtained a physical entity through printing technology, it was placed in a real background, it was digital- ly photographed again, and then it was transformed into data with other physical objects. Finally, in the actual work, it is printed as a photographic work with a physical body, or presented on the screen as part of the overall image. “Monkey” - the reality of life in this model is actually changing repeatedly during this process. Reality, life, and death depend on the methods and angles of viewing and feeling, and we should be more equal to them.

Human beings cannot survive without the support and company of plants. But not the other way around. Plants may not really care about humans. Over a long history, plants have evolved a wealth of strategies to increase reproductive efficiency through interactions with pollinators and competition or collaboration among their peers. In this process, humans have no sense of existence. So plants naturally do not care about humans. For example, human daily vision can only see a narrow spectral range, and the vision of objects that flowers really want to attract, such as bees, butterflies, and birds, is different from that of humans. Bees can see part of the ultraviolet light and under the bee’s field of vision, the ordinary flower may have a completely different color appearance.

Plants Don’t Care About Humans presents the appearance of plants under ultraviolet light, and also a non-human appearance presented to their symbiotic species.In the main narrative line, the protagonist “she” will serve plants.

“One day, she slept on the bed, but she felt uncomfortable. She felt that something was smothering her under her. Later, she lifted the mat and found sesame under it, and that sesame had been smothering her. Later, Sesame appeared repeatedly, and she couldn’t sleep well. “ —-Voice over in the video work

The preface sets off the atmosphere of the whole story. Sesame hints at the reason why “she” left, suggesting the family issues, which is a clue.

"She is the second wife of her husband. Her husband's ex-wife probably died of illness or divorced for other reasons. But she has a mean mother-in-law. When she was young, she couldn't bear the anger of her husband's family, so she went to Hong Kong with a sister. This photo was taken in a photo studio in Hong Kong. When she went back to her hometown to visit relatives, her husband hid her passport and she could not go to Hong Kong any more, so she could only stay in her hometown. Later, she gave birth to her eldest daughter , named "Shi Duo" , which means "Knowing you is superfluous!", the second daughter named "Yuehui", which means "the sun and the moon are proof, I will still come back. The names of the two daughters are her confrontation and dialogue with her mother in-laws. In addition to her two daughters, she has three sons whose names need to be taken from the genealogy. "

In the opportunity of the research in the Pearl River Delta region, Li Youcai's daughter provided this photo and this interesting story. It must be said that You Cai is an interesting, complex and contradictory character. Among Chinese rural women in that historical period, she was bold and stubborn, and her resolute departure was not a practice that every woman dared to try. At the same time, she is also using the details of life she can touch, the name of the child (daughter), a long-term symbol and a frequently used life vocabulary, to talk to her mother-in-law, a party who does not have the real power of the patriarchy but is the implementer of the system. confrontation. On the other hand, and also a question that puzzles me, how did she respond after her passport was hidden by her husband? Did she do anything to resist? Why did she choose to stay in the end? A copy was stolen and hidden Is her passport really the real reason she stayed?

Curiosity about Li Youcai's story and life experience is the driving force behind this project. Rather than recording, restoring, and elaborating, I prefer to imagine and rethink the issues I am interested in with reconstructed stories.

Li Youcai's migration is a common social life pattern in the Pearl River Delta. She roams between the countryside and the city, the opposite inland and the coast, reflecting the changes and reorganization of the internal population and culture here. But this project will not be a documentary that reproduces individual experiences. Li Caiduo is a starting point, a clue and a reference. We hope to create a fictional "she", "she" may be a possibility of Li Caiduo, "she" may also be me, "she" may also be "she". The "she" I see now is just a fork in the trail.