Kaitai is a graphic designer based in London, UK and Beijing, China. He studied in Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication. Studying in different contexts in China and the UK gave him a new understanding of the definition of time. His work focuses on the expression of time, and the idea that time is a human subjective feeling. Through sound, light effects, video editing techniques and 3D works he affects our sense of time through psychological and physiological ways.
Kaitai Xi
In 2021 I had a serious motorcycle accident. I flew off the road while racing in the mountains and I was lucky to survive. The accident continued to have a great psychological impact on me. Every day became extremely long.
Samsara is a Sanskrit/Pali word that means world. It is also the concept of rebirth and the cyclicality of all life, matter and existence, a fundamental belief of most Indian religions. Saṃsāra is sometimes referred to with terms or phrases such as transmigration, karmic cycle, reincarnation or Punarjanman, or the cycle of aimless drifting or wandering.
The Samsara of my work considers time under the influence of human subjective emotions and external elements like light and shadow, visual expression and colour. I explore the subjective changes in the experience of time and explain its flow through videos and sculpture works. Through the editing of the videos, I aim to have a subjective impact on people's feelings about time. Through semi-sculpture, I explore how I felt time changed at the moment of the accident
Excerpts from 'Part 1/ 24-Hour film (Daily Cycle)'
The first part is a 24-hour video that edits together images of different people riding motorbikes in daily life with dramatic accident footage. When I put together and play the videos of different people and their own torn riding experiences time begins to flow. These relatively independent times are connected together.
I divided the film into twelve parts and explored the time based effects of frame rate. Especially in the field of time, the number 12 has deep meaning in the Chinese tradition. In the traditional film, the film image is 24 frames per second. In order to make this speed performance different from slow motion, I reduced the shutter speed and adjusted the number of frames per second to 12. The effect is a feeling of deformation and a distortion of time and space. Some parts are very clear, but some parts are very vague. It creates a sense of distortion both physically and psychologically. The impact on audience caused creates a sense of urgency and an acceleration of time.
At the moment of my motorbike accident, time was like pressing the pause button and everything was slow and elegant. My visual field was brought about by real things to the brain, the things that suddenly changed colour in front of me at the moment of being hit, the chaos felt in a coma, and the smile of physical pain that made me know that I was still alive.
I present the unique feeling experienced by me at the moment of the accident in this semi-sculpture. Experiencing pain, getting out of pain, and returning to life. Such is the reincarnation of time. One of the key points in 'Part 2' of the work is human visual ability. Residual human vision is about one twenty-fourth of a second. I want to use this second work to express how a moment is extended into a period of time, just like bullet time.
In this work, I added one image that has not been modified, this is the picture of myself when I woke up in the hospital after the motorcycle accident. At that moment, I felt pain, the pain of bone fracture and the pain of blood covering the wound, but I was smiling. Because at that moment, I realised that I was still alive and I could still be with my family.
Medium:
Kinetic sculptureSize:
30 x 90 x 90cm
In this final work, I adjusted the speed of time back to the normal range in order to narrate my complete experience of the motorbike accident. My physical and psychological scars left traces in my life. I finally got rid of this shadow and returned to motorcycle riding.
This work plays nine videos of different lengths on one screen simultaneously. Due to the different media lengths there is a kind of visual confusion when the videos are played. However, through human visual errors and the automatic repair of the brain, the whole story will finally be put together in the viewer’s mind.