Minqi Xu
'Snow White', the first video I made about dream. It's a narrative story about escaping in dream.
'Bathing in a fish tank', a video explores the forbidden desires
Human is always the most interesting topic for me in my research, because our emotion is so unpredictable but at the same time, we share a collective experience. I intend to find out the bound connect to each other based on psychological analyse. The id, ego, and super-ego are the three distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche. I'm interested in how do we struggle among these three identities and how our original desires fight with morals and rules.
I started my research last term from dream and unconscious. It leads me to a further investigation, which is hidden and original desire. The more I learn about the dream the more I find out that dream is not only the virtual world showing random images. All our experiences in dreams come from unconscious and memory. So I would like to go deeper to dig out the source of it and see how to use video and installation to express this abstract concept.
'Shelter', a video about psychological defense mechanism
Research for my artwork
During the process of making installation 'Keep them till you die', I started to collect people's secrets as raw materials. So I put a sign and a bottle in the library of Wimbledon College of Arts collecting secret notes from students and staffs.
'Here Lies the Secrets of the Green-Wood Cementery.' Sophie Calle
On Saturday,June14 2014, in the Burthulet chapel cemetery,people from the area came and gave her their secrets. Then, in a ceremony, she buried these confidences under a tombstone.
She did many works about secrets and private information. In some ways, we are both interested in public's private life.In this artwork, she helped people to bury their untold secrets and keep them under the ground forever. However, in her another work 'The hotel, room..',she exposed people's private life inside the room by taking pictures of their belongs.
''The hotel,room 47' Sophie Calle
This is a two-part framed work comprising photographs and text. In the upper part, the title Room 47 is printed below a colour photograph of elegantly carved wooden twin head-boards behind a bed covered in rich brown satin. Below it, three columns of italic text are diary entries describing findings in the hotel room between Sunday 22 February 1981 and Tuesday 24.
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'My uncle rapped me when I was eight'
watercolor,UV pen writing
This work is a part of my experimenting process. As I attempt to add more information and show more than one side on a 2D image, I hide a link in it. Cubism is the first one to explore the concept of presenting different angles of the same object on a flat painting. In my case, the difference is that I need to show the psychological side rather than the physical side of a human. So I use two different methods to express them-Painting and Writing.
This painting could be read in two ways- one is with the normal light, another one is under the UV light. On the left-hand side is the image with normal light, which shows the face of a smiling girl. However, the image on the right-hand side delivers a totally opposite message. Many people hide their trauma deeply to themselves, because of shame or pain. In this case, UV light is a good method to show these dark secrets behind happy faces. I intend to alarm the audience of the truth that sometimes what we see is not what it is.
'I'm desperate' Gillian Wearing
Wearing asked people to write down a thought in their mind and take a picture with it. Like many of Wearing’s later works, such as Confess All on Video. Don’t worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? the Signs series examines the relationship between public image and private identity. This photo especially appeals to me, because of the strangeness between this person and the words he wrote. He looks like a man from a middle-class family, who is supposed to live a comfortable life, but he said he is desperate. It makes me think about another side of a person that we don't usually see.
'keep them till you die'
2019
installation, chair,desk,carpet,lamp,UV light, writing on the cushion
This work was made for the 'IMMUREMENT' exhibition in Crypt Gallery, there was a shelter in the war years and it became a catacomb after the war. Considering the history of the Crypt Gallery and also the special space of it, I made this installation called " Keep them till you die", which aims to dig out people's hidden secrets and untold experience.
For the working process, I invited people to write down their secrets on paper and put them in a bottle. After one week I collected and selected some secrets and I wrote them on the chair making them become a part of the installation. All the furniture that I found in charity shops and I carefully selected the ones with scratches and marks. The reason I did that is to add more narration in my work. Expect from the writing I add on them, they already carried some stories. This work creates an uncanny and immersive scene that looks like a domestic space. It allows the audience to peep at others’ private life, but at the same time, it also reminds them of their secrets.
For this work, I didn't maintain the original situation of them, instead, I collaged them. To show that the scene I build not only represents one family but for people from various backgrounds, I reconstructed the chair with different legs. In this scene, the chair lacks one leg, the desk, and the lamp fall on the floor. All of them show a place where goes through a fight or destroy. These details are made for suggesting how secrets affect one's life.
More information about 'IMMUREMENT' exhibition
' Remains of the day' Mona Hatoum
' Untitled' Doris Salcedo
These two artworks explore the absence of the human body. Used materials are profoundly human; they all bespeak the presence of a human being. 'Remains of the day' is a scene made of fragile material—carbon. Every piece of 'Untitled' was combined with domestic wooden furniture with cement. Both artists used objects to speak for the absent people about the traumatic effects of war. These artworks inspire me to use found objects and create a scene. So the audience could read the story from the evidence and use their imagination to fulfill it.
'Secret Anonymous'
2019
single channel video with sound, 5'59''
This video records a performance that I am reading out loud people's secrets. I create a scene like an anonymous meeting where a place people could share everything without fear. Secrets are usually something people hide to themselves. I collected secrets from strangers as raw materials and transfer them into my artwork. The performance allows all these buried thoughts or experiences expose to sunlight again, which forced the audience to face them directly. This work also discusses the relationship between present and absence, even though the secret holders don't present, their words as a shred of evidence live forever.
' Hello, Finale!' Tao Hui
video installation, 2017
I saw this artwork in Shanghai two years ago, and it has a big influence on me for my practice. 'Hello, Finale!' is a video installation with nine monitors. Each video shows a person talking on the phone. The talkers are people of different occupations, and they talk in different places. Tao Hui only provides half of the story to the audience. Another half conversation from the phone needs to be imagined by viewers. To some extends, I consider it an interactive artwork, because it attracts the audience to think about the whole story.
' The girl chewing gum' John Smith
single channel video, 1976
A month ago I attended a screening event in LCC, where I first watch John Smith’s film ‘The girl chewing gum’. In the film, people walk through this scene and cars drive past while a voiceover of the artist appears to provide directions for the movements of people, as well as those of pigeons and a clock’s hands. The most interesting part is when I realised the voiceover actually was a picture-talk, which means Smith adds a narration on a recording real daily scene and pretends this is a shooting site.
'Alice, Max, John, Sally, Jenny, and Will'
2019, HD video, 3 screens, color, sound, 4’ 54”.
When I watch people talk to each other, especially when they speak a language that I can't understand, I'm wondering what are they talking about, and I'm imagining what kind of people are they. Once my friend played a game with me while we were waiting for food in the restaurant. She said let's make a voiceover for the two men at that table. It becomes the first idea of how I begin this project. So I randomly shot some clips that people talking and wrote lines for them. It's an unconventional way of making a film because the result is unknown. I want to challenge it and see where it goes.
3 screens are playing 3 stories at the same time then they change to another 3 stories. So in total, there are 6 conversations among 6 groups of people. In my screenplay, all these conversations are mainly talking about 6 characters, Alice, Max, John, Sally, Jenny, and Will. They all appear in different scenes. During the conversations, the audience can see the relationship between each character and they could read a secret from one of those six characters.
There is no performance and music or special post-production effects in this video. What I did just to restore the scene in my understanding. Even though all videos were shot in the daily situation ( no uniform light or color setting), I edited them in one single color to make them look like a series. All images in the video were filmed by a GoPro 5, which I held with a small tripod everywhere. GoPro was made for recording movement, like sport or travel. It's easy to carry and it's small. I utilize the function of it to shoot strangers secretly. It's very interesting to see people's expressions and reactions closely. Because we don't usually pay attention to it, since I need to add lines which base on it, I watched the clips so many times and thought about how to give a story for each character. After I finished this project, it opens up so many other possibilities for me to play with storytelling.
The background sound was recorded by my phone separately. The original soundtracks of videos are not very perfect, which mixed some talking by me or the sound of button clicking.
The screenplay was modified many times, because of the names and some sensitive topics that I need to be very careful with. For instance, in the original script, there is one scene talking about sexual orientation. To make it more dramatic, three characters gossip about their technician in college, Jenny, who was cheated on her husband and kissed a woman. When I showed it to others, I was reminded that I need to be careful when it includes any sensitive topics like sexual orientation, race, politics, unless I do it on purpose for shaping the characters. So I changed the screenplay to another direction. It was very challenged to write an English screenplay. I have to overcome the difficulties of writing in another language and also choosing words, to make it sounds like the narrative speaker. The hardest part is how to arrange the plot delicately, which has to be daily but not cheesy. It was a learning process for me to write a screenplay which shows the personality and attitude of each character but also avoid to offend the audience from different cultures background.
' Fifth Night',Yang Fudong 2010, HD video Installation, 7 screens, black-and-white, sound, 10’ 37”.
This seven screens video installation shows the same scene from seven different angles. Each screen focuses on one or two characters as the foreground and also shows other characters as background. It allows the audience to see the whole story from a different angle and a different character's perspective. All videos are black and white, which helps to connect all of them as a union.
'Rear Windows' Alfred Hitchcock
This film is about a story of peeping. The main character Jeff watches his neighbors from the window every day and guess what everyone is doing. This film shows the perspective of Jeff and invites the audience to become the 'Peeping tom' watch others private life. In the movie, Jeff found out a dirty secret from one of the neighbors by looking at his house. Windows are like movie screens, and different stories are playing in the house.
