Be Sampan (人如舢舨)
About
“Be Sampan” is a reflective creation by the artist, who returned to his hometown of Fujian to conduct field research, revolving around the theme of “from the Tanka to post-humanity in the present”. The Tanka people (疍民) are a special group of people – they live on the water and cannot go ashore all their lives, mostly around Asia seas. As a long-standing concern of sociologists, “Tanka” embodies complex issues of water and land, pre-modern and modern, ethnic discrimination from people on shore, and stereotypes from Westerners who came to China in about 20th century. The work imagines the experience of a Tanka coming ashore and their fictional writing “Deformed Bodies” (曲体集). Together, VR and printmaking form a narrative that focuses on the individual's story within the context of grand historical events. At the same time, this work is also a VR experiment exploring the “binocular rivalry.”