A poem about the bulbullar
2023
video Installation, dimensions variable
video (2023, single-channel video, 6 min 07 sec), bus seats, bus windows, sequined fabrics, mini electric fans, LED lights
The video "A poem about the bulbullar" captures a Cai Feng (Collecting wind) field trip of countryside musicians and their students on a bus, where I accompanied and filmed them. The video is accompanied by a poem I adapted from the works of Velimir Khlebnikov. "Bulbul" refers to a bird often metaphorically used to describe a singer. The singing of the musicians during the journey is profoundly moving, and in my eyes, they are great artists. People often forget that they are not only subjects of field trips (conducted by researchers and creators from cities) but also the creators themselves. Their singing and playing may also originate from field trips.
The exhibition site is made to resemble the interior of the bus; I wish to bring back the scene that I love. I want to revisit it again and again and reunite with the people in the film. "Cai Feng" embodies the positions of subject and object. In the film, the musicians gaze outside the window, and I watch them. Yet, in the exhibition, the audience sits in their seats, watching everything unfold. However, beyond the bus windows, there is no "landscape". Within the window-frames, resembling screens and viewfinders, only eternal flickering noise persists. The sequined fabrics were found in rural markets during my time living there. Throughout the bus cabin, there is a faint shimmering on the walls.
This video installation is the first part of my solo exhibition "Samples of air" exploring the concepts of field trips, sampling, and framing. The following text is provided by the curator, Chen Min:
"Since ancient times, 'collecting wind' （Cai Feng采风） has been a means of governance in which the central autorities sends regular officials to localities to collect ballads, and see the success or failure of policies through what people sing. In Chinese language, the word 'Feng'（风） has different meanings: wind, spirit, landscape, ballads, etc. From the left-wing poetry movement of the 1930s to the socialist 50s-80s, literati and artists answered the call to 'go to the masses'. This movement attempted to reconcile individual creation with social production and to make artists part of the socialist productive mechanism.
We could consider 'collecting wind' as a system of information feedback mechanisms with aesthetic value, it prioritizes productivity over authorship and originality. At the entrance of the exhibition, Li Dan's video installation A Poem about the Bulbullar documents the journey of a collecting trip, showing the pure moment of the birth of a 'work of art'. 'Collecting wind', or to say, sampling air refers to her mode of working, and the purity of the questions raised by sampling constitutes the object of her work."
