Z Z Z

Variations on a Branching Sea

出海口的变奏曲

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.

作品中的主人公是一位虚构的女性，在半虚构的世界观设定中，她作为一个不断迁徙的外来务工人员，从相对的内陆到南方沿海地区，在这段旅途中，她将邂逅不同 的生灵——模式生物、植物、石头、云、神灵，甚至为它们工作。观众也将透过她的眼光来注视大海。她终于到达了海边，但印象中法力无边的大海早已被搅动，似 乎已不再是广阔且难以踏足的领域。

这是一个虚构作品，但虚构的背后揉合了珠三角地区的地方民俗、神话、信仰、地理，全球化背景下的务工潮和人员迁徙现象，大型基建的事故新闻，以及创作者自身的想象。创作者希望通过虚构的力量触及原无法触及的现实。

毫无疑问，流动、迁徙是这个作品中的重要母题之一。我们或多或少都在全球化编织的美梦中畅想过未来，但如今，常态化的新冠疫情和早已抬头的保守势力使我们从梦中惊醒。也许这也是一个重新思考这一母题的时机，如何重新编织自我与他者、其它事物、以及世界的关系网?

20世纪90年代初，我在中国的珠江三角洲地区出生，也就是闻名世界的世界工厂的所在地。笼统地说，我这一代出生于前全球化时代，成长于全球化时代，又在成人 后的当下见证全球化的的崩解。不得不说，我自身也是一个得益于全球化带来的珠三角繁荣经济的既得利益者。而曾经被投喂的美梦则是用无数看不见的剥削链条编 织而成的，在这张大网中，身份复杂且不断流变，主动投身和被卷入的个体都无法真实地看清自身的位置。

“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.