| Dance to the Life and Death in the Fateverse Forest (2022-23) is a two-channel video installation including a semidocumentary shot in Beijing, Shanghai, and Mount Lu and a dance composed in Vancouver in response. One day, while taking a walk in a neglected / reclaimed park behind the Today Art Museum, I found a small PVC board, on which the words “Metaverse Forest” were printed. As a pun, Fateverse’s pronunciation in Chinese is identical to that of Metaverse. Instead of digital virtual worlds and hyperconnectivity, Fateverse epitomizes fatedness and powerlessness in organized structures, such as a human society or inter-species systems. The assemblage of content in the moving images ranging from restricted lives to military training, from momentary eroticism to calming nature, as well as the embodied movements of my first endeavor to dance are avenues to ponder the power hierarchies, morality of pleasure-seeking, and inevitable madness within such structures. |
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