Li Ran
Same Old Crowd

The four-channel video installation Same Old Crowd by Li Ran departs from the documentation of an unknown city and takes place in an ambiguous temporal and spatial frame. Twelve characters (amateur actors hired by the artist) appear in black-and-white in highly stylized surroundings wearing patterned cloths. The identities or time periods of the characters, all deprived of languages, are impossible to determine. Punctuated by staccato sounds and fast camerawork, the protagonists’ exaggerated expressions and emphatic gestures create a high level of tension. For the Li Ran, repetitions in the video do not attempt to level notion of “difference.” Rather repetition is antithetical to the notion of novelty within the discourse of reality, modernity, and media. As such, Same Old Crowd recalls the artists’ earlier video Beyond Geography and can also be seen as a type of anthropological theater intersecting with performance studies.