Wei Zhou (She/They)
Wei Zhou is a Chinese filmmaker and visual artist based in Glasgow, UK. Her art practice encompasses video, photography, sound, smell, and text. Most of her works are autobiographical, whether realistic or imaginary, they often reflect on the topics of multi-sensory and eroticism. Her recent research and practice investigate the domination/submission dynamics between audio-visual, as well as the tactility in different senses and across mediums.
Tactility, (dis)continuity, and fragments.
Tactility not only can be associated with physical materials but also with audio-visual work. (Dis)continuity exists within the time-based video work itself and also outside of the work, it blurs the boundaries of time, space, and medium. The story must go on, be it text, paper, sound, fabric, or molecule in scent, they linger and prolonged so the story can be “alive” then “live-d”. Durational work often has its limit creating an illusion of a complete story with a start and end, but I often wonder “but what’s next”. If fantasy is the future, it also can be the rewrite of history. Deformation of the past can distort reality, the most painful and the most pleasurable are interchangeable.
BECOMING OCTOPUS
Becoming Octopus explores the tactility of the audio-visual, inquiries the differences between fiction and non-fiction, reality and fantasy, subjectivity and objectivity, closeness and distance through personal memories, and polyamorous erotic fantasies. Instead of an optical way of looking, a haptic looking is suggested by Laura U. Marks, the camera functions as an eye, also touches. The Octopus, a shape-shifter, a soft and moist malleable being, an embodiment of the erotic, a short-sighted sea-creature who knows the world mostly through touching, through muscular intelligence, an embodied cognition which doesn’t necessarily process directly by the central brain, the feeling of knowing someone by being physically close. Becoming Octopus attempts to arouse a multi-sensory experience that includes optic, haptic and auditory sensations.
(Headphones are recommended.)
RESURFACE
Resurface is a work that documents the fragmentation of death anxiety, traumatic memories, pain, love marks, bruises, inscription and transforms them to be pleasurable. Resurface is about the experience of physicalization of the intangible memories and allows them to re-surface as visible marks, be it temporary or permanent. Resurface in order to heal. Through the intense closeness of the visual and distanced memories of the voice, the erotic oscillates.
Content warning: This work might contain triggering content such as death anxiety, self-harming, explicit sexual content, loud sound.
(Headphones are recommended.)
RESURFACE-D
Resurface-d is a series of photography work made alongside the video work Resurface. These series of photos were shot on 120mm medium format films. Using present and past tense, this work attempts to investigate the materiality of the digital and physical, and how do they leave marks.
