Jingwen Xu

I want to express a state of being trapped without knowing it. This might be invisible mind control or purposeful ideological enlightenment. One of the protagonists in my story is a rabbit who lives in a comfortable environment with sunshine, blue sky and tender grass. Enjoying the physical comfort, the rabbit gradually gives up thinking, becomes slow in telling good from evil and truth from lies, and eventually falls into a trap and boundless darkness. Pathetically, the rabbit will not realize it until death. There are two protagonists in the video, namely the rabbit doll with human characteristics and the rabbit played by me as a human being. The rabbit played by me is not a real rabbit, and I’m not a human as well. What I’m playing is more like a brainwashing role above all rabbits. This is an inexplicable feeling which is always so treacherous and unreal just like looking up at the world from the muddy bottom and staring at the face opposite through the flame. This work is lovely and interesting, with a little darkness.

This work was inspired by my fantasy about my grandmother’s breasts. Such fantasy probably reveals my dependence on motherhood as well as exploration and cognition of gender in my early childhood. At that time, I stubbornly thought that my grandmother’s breasts had got supernatural power to send signals to aliens and connect with them. Therefore, I built a virtual breast planet where there are alien creatures with both female breasts and male genitalia who explore for water and spread their seeds for reproduction. I created the image of these aliens and played one of them myself. This work seems to be relaxing and full of fun with bright colors, but many strange factors can be found beneath the lovely appearance. They are hermaphroditic creatures who are divided into different classes, namely the leaders and the people. Their birth and reproduction are like virus invasion, and they look like mutated creatures.

In this work, I mainly want to express the repression of childhood and the evil of children, which is caused by the suffocating education and school life, and such evil comes from human nature itself. Tadpoles and ducks are the props used in this video. Frog eggs have to become tadpoles before they develop into frogs. In my film, there will be frog eggs with blood, falling tadpoles and tadpoles crushed after being caught, accompanied by the sound of foot trampling and tadpoles’ cracking. In this video, none of the tadpoles manage to grow into frogs in the end. They are eventually trampled, with their bodies exposed to the hot sun, which is bloody and tragic. Nevertheless, the inner struggle and suffering under the highly intense mental pressure is also a kind of invisible bloodiness and tragedy. In ancient China, “鸭” (a Chinese character meaning “duck”) and “甲” (a Chinese character meaning “first rate” or “class A”) were homophones, so “鸭” means to be the Number One Scholar in the imperial examination, which implies a bright future and academic success. In the film, two children kill a duck and then inserted the its head into the mound in the shape of a birthday cake and sang a birthday song for the duck. The scene seems very absurd. It is a memorial ceremony as well as a celebration.