Fang Lu
No World
No World is an action-filled video work filmed inside an abandoned museum in the Songzhuang area outside Beijing. Without using any dialogue, Fang Lu created an artificial scenario where she instructed actors with a list of tasks to gesturally mime scenes from news and journalistic images outside China. Through an intuitive self-trained mimicry, these acts simultaneously became moves in a game as well as a daily routine. No World points to the changing roles of the camera from a device originally invented to memorialize a moment to a tool that situationally creates an event. The performance of violence, conflicts and human relationships in the confined space blurs the boundary between the gallery and everyday life, between staged performance and documentary footage. The work is also a metaphor for a desire in today’s youth to go beyond their controlled, mediated environment and perform chaos in order to heighten their existential awareness.