Fake Landscape is a series of moving images, “Peach Blossom Spring” and “Waterfall”. Images such as “Huangshan” are idealized “perfect” landscapes in popular aesthetics. This kind of “neo-folk art”- appears as a decoration in life scenes, replacing the scenery around us with artificially synthesized “second nature”. These include the “dynamic Fengshui 风水picture” light box installations that are trendy in the living room of common people. These are popular daily decorations in the life of towns and villages. This kind of aesthetic consciousness is the folk-customized spirit of natural, you can see it in the furniture, you can experience it without leaving the house, wandering around the world, pretending to live among the scenery of mountains and rivers. What they have in common is: false gaudy happy imagination and exaggerated sense of joy.
What interests me are the “low-tech” products of rural life and the folk aesthetic taste in them. This taste often reflects the public’s imagination of happiness and a better life in contemporary rural life. It also reflects the inter-language between humanity, society and nature. Such expressions and imaginations are often common in traditional folk New Year paintings, embroidery and ornaments. However, in today’s countryside, new media such as sound, light and ceramic tiles have translated into a new concept of progress and a redefine sense of the times. We can define them as rural values. When pulling out of the original frame and environment, quietly gazing at these images will be gradually brought into these fictitious scenes.
The pictures and sound in the work are from interviews of 25 local young people rging in age from 16 to 30 in Shiman Village near Lijiang. Artist field research include understanding the current situation here, be interested, and be realistic, as well as asking questions about the currant changes, views on hometown and distant places, etc. Therefore, the batch works are produced and built on the above-mentioned field environment investigation and data collection. I have experienced the countryside along the way. The purpose of the artistic system I developed is to understand and intervene today as the other person. In the process of drastic changes and “losing blood “in the new countryside, youth and “good scenery” and are Utopia taking the place of the countryside that will never return.