Yuan Keru Traces of the Afterimage Spurs Gallery, Beijing 18 December – 16 January
Yuan Keru’s latest exhibition exudes a heavy sense of melancholy. Featuring two new videoworks, it traces the experiences and impact of disability, illness and trauma. Guest of the Mist 2037 (2020–21; shown on the gallery’s ground floor) draws on two literary sources – celebrated Portuguese author José Saramago’ s novel Blindness (1995) and Bi Feiyu’s awardwinning Massage (2008, a tale about blind masseurs), while the video installation Eternity and Transience (2021; shown on the first floor) draws on the artist’s own family history with Hepatitis (ffff). In both Yuan expresses her concern about the state of individuals affected by diseases by mixing the real and the fictional.
In Guest of the Mist 2037, set in a world long after an epidemic of blindness (as imagined in Blindness), the artist reveals the lives of a blind community living inside a dilapidated hospital through the eyes of an unnamed main character who has survived with her eyes intact and is searching for the caretaker who looked after her during the epidemic years. Acted by ten blind people from different professions, the film throws us into an encounter with the folded reality of the disabled, many of whom are living in isolation while finding their own ways to come to terms with their disabilities. Scenes from the film are further presented via photography and installation, by which an immersive experience is created in a way that enhances the sense of reality. Images of the film, greyish in colour, slowly moving with the music, are subtly rendered, pushing forward the idea that it is through blindness that we see anew.
On the upper floor, Eternity and Transience, a three-channel video, explores understated issues relating to ffff through three archetypes played by three actors – a mother who passed on the infection to her child, an eighteenyear-old girl (based upon the artist’s younger self recounting how she lost her father to the disease) and an unemployed jobseeker.
The videowork is accompanied by a novella, Cottage, Island, and Dragon Well Lane, by Wu Qihua in collaboration with Zhang Xianzhu (the first person in China to file an ffff antidiscrimination case), which narrates fragments of a female carrier’s life during the late 1990s and early 2000s, while partially reflecting a labour history of China at the time, and in particular the social and political injustices one might face when infected with ffff. As a thorough investigation into the disease’s impacts on social relations, the work succeeds in connecting physical diseases with social maladies, and in making the invisible visible. The show not only demonstrates Yuan’s artistic skill, but also reveals her ambitious intention to probe the subject of disability in contemporary China – a subject that is often neglected by the government and in art. Without seeking to propose solutions to any of these issues, the exhibition raises important questions that otherwise might never have been asked. Suchao Li