Songkai Zhou

Songkai Zhou was born in Henan, China in 1992. He studied filmmaking, literature and philosophy of art at China Academy of Art and the Royal College of Art. His works are about personal existence or public life, and relationships between natural elements and human beings or historical memory in the contemporary technology era. His works span a diverse range of artistic media such as poetry, painting, film, photography and other artistic media. In his film works, he utilises non-logical implicit narrative to explore the visual poetics of cinematography in the flow of time.

Recent exhibitions of his work have been shown at London Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, London, UK, 2022; Jiangsu Art Museum (New Museum), Nanjing, China, 2021; Mecal Pro Barcelona International Short and Animation Festival, Barcelona, Spain, 2020; International Short Film Festival for Children and Youth Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 2020; UK Film Festival, London, UK, 2019.

In my experimental animation, I try to explore the specific aesthetics of film in the context of phenomenology. I shape the experience of watching through the deployment of moving images and the management of time. I create abstract paintings on 16mm and 35mm film with earth, water, fire and wind: these four elements as pigments, or improvise calligraphy with ink on film, transcribing texts from the Diamond Sutra and Tao Te Ching. The character of embodiment is presented in these moving images. It is the trace of the active body that was making the film, and the trace of the experience flow about the phenomenal world. The themes and techniques of the film mirror each other here as a holistic existence. The technology itself is carrying on the narrative, and the narrative is just unfolding in the technology.

The road and free will, contemporary technology and historical memory, etc; these concepts and things do not exist in the film as independent objects of observation. Rather, these things are present in watching itself. All kinds of techniques used have been transformed into narrative means in the film. The existence of each imagery and technique together constructs the opening of the film's theme.

Unnamed Road

The film Unnamed Road takes the road and fate as its theme, and divides the chapters with earth, water, fire and wind. The road is the road under each person's feet. The road is always in the process of becoming, changing and unfolding. The road has not yet reached the end, so it is called ‘unnamed’. In the film, the four elements of earth, water, fire and wind express the various encounters of individual life in the world. At the same time, these four things are also in the context of the contemporary technological age, forcing human beings to search for the connection between themselves and nature.

Credits

Director:

Songkai Zhou

Sound Designer:

Jenny Shen

Special Thanks:

Joe King

Suzanne Buchan

Shan Huang

Tianhua Lin

Bipasha Mukherjee

Jordan Behnan