The Rumbling

Three channels color video installation, S-16mm film to 2K, 2K digital video, stereo sound

15 min 21 sec

2023

Supported by Macalline Center of Art

Filmed at a decommissioned quarry on an island in the Southern China, The Rumbling is a visual variation interweaving video records of landscape and human activities; through narrations and fragmented dialogues that have obscured the line between intimacy and alienation, this work traces the silhouette of image remains left by lost human existences and erased voices amid the powerful current of the times. Half a century ago, the wasteland we now stand on was once a transfer station where the anchor lifter exerted their last effort. The sound in the film becomes a medium that activates "undead" substances, reverberating with vanished corporeal existences and the echoes from terrestrial rumbling; this is a synchronized vibration of sound waves generated by the deformation and rupture as a result of the compressing and surging stifled from the "inside" before the advent of a turbulent commotion. The cracks and folds on the earth's surface resemble a hyper slow-motion film. Historic time can be excavated from landscape and later sinks to the bottom of the sea just like sandstone or granite, dissolving into void or forming a new land. Vague memories of landforms, people met through serendipity, and modern ruins jointly construct a phantasmal decay. What the artist takes an interest in, though, is to create a balanced form that melds multiple times and narratives within the decay.

About the Artist

Hu Wei (b.1989, Dalian, China) graduated from CAFA and obtained an MA at Dutch Art Institute (DAI) in NL in 2016, and currently lives and works in Beijing. He works in a variety of media, including film making, installation, printed images, performance and drawing. His interest often begins with the seemingly unrelated elements between text and visual culture, exploring the multiple, speculative connections between art and reality in relation to both political and formal level through research, "translation" and imagination. His recent practice travels through different geo-contexts and "silencing" histories and materials, investigating the dynamics, fragmentation and synthetic alienation of human, non-human and material in the process of historical and natural transformation. Combined with moving images and essayistic aesthetics, his works also unfold the precarious relationship between invisible labor, affect, and value judgments in different political and economic environments.