Tang Dixin, Reed, Video, Color, Sound, 10’17”, 2019

As much as Tang Dixin’s video may give the impression of a documentary film, once the work begins to reel, one quickly realizes the necessity for adopting a fictional perspective. A young Chinese Tang, who met a young Japanese Nan and convinced him to be buried in a hole among the reeds. This process seemed like two lonely strangers coincidentally met and played a game together, a unique encounter that could not have be repeated. Tang Dixin has an acute ability to grasp theatricality in a contemporary sense–the unusual, illogical and arbitrary encounters of strangers in an unfamiliar environment. The tacit understanding the two men have achieved is final, which neither has a past or a future, nor influenced by any conditions, but in the scenes constructed by these moving images here and now.