Zhou Tao: The Worldly Cave + Blue and Red

Mount Analogue · Art + Cinema presents the work of acclaimed artist Zhou Tao with The Worldly Cave (2017, 48 min) and Blue and Red (2014, 25 min). 

Over the past 20 years, Zhou Tao (b. 1976, Changsha) has become one of China’s most beguiling video artists. Zhou’s landscape works observe subjects persisting in the extremes of nature and modernity, such as an infrastructural project in the far reaches of the Gobi Desert or a data center in the lush Guizhou province. Rather than explicating the obvious political import of these spaces, Zhou’s is primarily affective, swimming in the shadows of new globalized topographies, concerned primarily with the liminality of these altered 21st century landscapes.

Blue and Red (2014, 25 min), one of Zhou’s first works intended for the cinema, is set in Guangzhou, China and Bangkok, Thailand, just before the 2014 Thai military coup. Revolving around a looming fluorescent dome, shot as if it were a celestial body, the film hovers in the dome’s orbit, depicting figures bathed in the glow of LEDs like moths attracted to a demonic obelisk. Generating the feeling of modern life reshaped into a psychedelic panopticon, most of the images are of bodies, lying in repose, shifting under the modulating color frequencies, or of humans staring offscreen at the hypnotic lights. Some of the most striking images in Blue and Red are documents of terrain, rendered otherworldly through the collision of nature and infrastructure. 

Many of the ideas from Blue and Red - man’s insignificance in the face of hyper-modernity, the patchwork creation of a globalized landscape, the dominion of the digital over the organic - are further developed in The Worldly Cave (2017, 48 min), which Zhou shot across China, Korea, Spain, and the United States. Within The Worldly Cave, the earth as we know it is crumbling. The machinery is rusted, the landscapes are desolate, and the primary remnants of humanity are the shards of livelihoods abandoned in the world’s rapid modernization. The post-apocalyptic imagery is astonishing, observing cows wandering through laundry machines abandoned in the desert and humans persisting through seas of brown. As the artist describes this work, "images and reality are constructing a topologic booklet. No scripts, no stories, the light became the protagonist, the landscape became the protagonist."

Program organized by David Dinnell and Eric Zhu, descriptions adapted from program notes by Eric Zhu.

Zhou Tao’s 2024 work Periphery of the Base (53 min) will screen at the Mini Mart City Park gallery on September 17.