How have the site and climate of the desert influenced your practice?
Recently, I’ve been working on an ongoing body of work called Groundless Flower. It’s heavily inspired by a desert trip. I find the desert itself, the idea of it, really fascinating. Through this project, I’ve been thinking a lot about so-called desert philosophy, a philosophical desert, and what that means. Obviously, many great writers have written about it, right? There’s the [Deleuzian] register, where it’s a place stripped of all the known coordinates. And in my practice, I’m interested in talking about nomadism in relation to this. I feel like there’s a connection there.
I also came across a really interesting book by Aidan Tynan, The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics. It’s about how the desert shows up in modern Western literature and philosophy. Basically, it argues that our society constructed the desert as the opposite of the familiar urban landscape. We made it into this otherworldly space, a non-place, to stand in for the sublime or the apocalypse. Think of Mad Max, right? Or the film Dune. When I read that, it struck me as no different from how the East has historically been seen as the opposite of the West. There’s a long history there.
I was also thinking about the nomadic tribes who lived in the desert. It’s really a twofold question. They’re known for their way of life out there, their nomadism, but it’s actually not an easy life. It reminds me of Lawrence of Arabia, which is a great film. There’s a famous line in a conversation between Lawrence and the prince, [Faisal], I think, who says that no Arab loves the desert. They love water and green trees. So when you think about that conflict, the contrast, the struggle, and how people try to reconcile it all, it’s profound. It’s deep. All of that fascinates me. And one reason I’m drawn to the desert is that I love road trips. I always do these discursive road trips, driving here and there to film things, or sometimes just to feel good. I love going into the desert, into no-man’s-land, the so-called wasteland, wherever there are fewer people. But the work itself is not just a depiction of the desert.
Why do you take these long road trips alone?
It’s for a very secular reason, to be honest. When I go to film, it’s often very discursive and I’m not someone who has a rigorous plan before I go somewhere. One of my favorite ways to travel is to just hop in the car and get behind the wheel. To this day, that’s still one of my favorite places in the world, other than the cabin of a long-haul flight. So I just start driving.
It’s a very difficult way to travel for a lot of people who need a more planned itinerary, which is totally understandable, but it’s just not something I can do. I like the surprise, the unknown, the uncertainty I run into, and the danger that comes with it, of course. But over time you learn how to prepare better and minimize the danger along the way.
And when I start filming, it’s hard to have others waiting on me. To get the right kind of footage, sometimes you put yourself in a challenging environment on purpose. Sometimes you have to wait several days for the sky to clear or for the light to be perfect. It’s just hard when someone else is with you. I love going into the desert, into no-man’s-land, the so-called wasteland, wherever I see fewer human beings.
What makes a good collaboration?
To me, collaboration is a bit like an event. If it goes right, it can be really transformative. If it’s not going well, it can ruin your work. You have to respect each other, understand what the other person is doing, and leave space. Leave them alone when they’re working on their thing, the way they do for me when I’m working on mine. I love being with my friends, but I also really enjoy being alone. Maybe it’s no longer shameful to admit that I actually loved the pandemic. I enjoyed it and even hoped for a longer quarantine. Certainly not the case for many people.
You have to be lucky to find a good collaborator. Take Frank Carlberg, for example. He’s my music composer for both films in the Flower series, and we’ll probably work together on the third. He’s an amazing experimental jazz musician from Finland, really knowledgeable about his field, and he has an open mind, which I think is very important.
We met at the MacDowell fellowship. I was holding an open studio. It wasn’t mandatory, but I wanted to show the other fellows what I was working on. I had some really rough work in progress with a terrible soundtrack I’d borrowed from YouTube, Kurt Stenzel’s score for Jodorowsky’s Dune. It wasn’t really working for the image. Frank came to see the work, didn’t say much, and went back to his studio. The next morning, there were three short soundtrack clips in my inbox. I put his sound over my video and thought, ” This is perfect!” That’s how we started working together.
What was it like to show Groundless Flower in public space?
First, a shout-out to High Line Art and the Chanel Culture Fund; the works wouldn’t have been possible without their sponsorship. The Shanghai Museum of Glass has a program called Annealing, where they invite contemporary artists, not necessarily glass artists, to explore the material, work with the craftsmen, and put together an exhibition. That show is more like a typical museum exhibition. The video is shown inside, alongside a larger-scale glass installation that naturally connects, material-wise, to sand, stainless steel, metal, and painted canvas.
The High Line project was a public presentation, right on the High Line, which is a very unique setting for screening a film for two months. There’s a technical threshold: you need a really powerful projector, and the color looks a little off at the brightest time of day. The sound was rather delicate, so it was overwhelmed by the ambient noise of New York. I can’t remember how many times a siren went off in the background during the film. In a way, I think it adds another layer of meaning to the work.
But what made the High Line commission interesting wasn’t just the physical setting. It was the historical context. There’s a similarity between the High Line and the film: both reinvent history. The High Line was an old freight railroad track that became a park and public art institution. And the film uses a lot of historical references, references to mythologies from different cultures. My way of working with these old mythologies is not to treat them as relics, but to break them, reassemble them, blend them, scramble them together.
Can you tell us about the character in the painting behind us?
This one has a name: Pangu. It comes from a Chinese myth. Pangu is considered one of the creator gods in Chinese mythology who opened up the universe. And in the ancient records, its gender was initially unclear.
After it died, its body dissolved into everything we have in the world now. Its hair became the trees and grass, its blood became the rivers, and its flesh became the mountains and rocks.
But if you look at this Pangu, the appearance is a blend. You may remember the image of the three-headed Satan in Dante’s Inferno, with each mouth devouring a great traitor in history: one eating Judas, the other two eating Brutus and Cassius, who assassinated Julius Caesar. When I was reinventing this character, I merged these two figures, the Satan of the Inferno and the image of Pangu, to invent my own character for the film.
How do you approach translation in your films?
Sometimes I start writing in English, and sometimes in Chinese. For Groundless Flower, I started in Chinese and then translated into English, with a great writer, Amy Lin, who worked on the script with me from the very beginning. A lot of the phrases actually came to me while I was lost in the desert. I gathered these fragments as they popped into my mind, wrote them down, brought them back, and started putting them together into prose, or some kind of loosely poetic language. I thought about translating after.
The translation itself wasn’t very difficult for me because I wasn’t worried about losing meaning or misreading. In a way, that’s just a natural part of translating. I don’t want to go back to that cliché article everybody knows, Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” about how translating is always a very violent process, how you’re always reinventing. But I’m really not a control freak who feels every word needs to be that accurate. I’m not writing an essay; it’s creative writing.
There’s always a little bit of distance, whether I’m writing in Chinese or in English now. It’s very similar to the feeling of traveling in both places. When you go back to China, you’re sort of a stranger now, and in New York, you’ll probably be a stranger forever. You get that feeling in writing as well. It’s an interesting condition. When you’re writing in English, you make word choices a native speaker probably wouldn’t, and it happens in Chinese too. That’s actually quite exciting sometimes. And I like to think text can also be just visual material. It doesn’t have to have any meaning. It can be a total logic of sensation. It makes you feel something, and you don’t necessarily need to read the whole thing.
