He Xiangyu

Terminal 3

He Xiangyu’s Terminal 3 presents excerpts from the lives of young African acrobats attending the Hebei Wuqiao Acrobatic Arts School in China. Acrobatics, which had a rich history as a court display in imperial China, is now integral to the cultural industries and tourism sector in Wuqiao, continuing a legacy of expending bodies for monetary gain. From 2016 to 2019, He intermittently went to Wuqiao Acrobatics School in Hebei Province to record the daily lives of the students who study a variety of acrobatic skills during their year-long program. Most of these students are 14-20 years old, from Ethiopia or Sierra Leone, and hope to participate in the circus in Europe or teach acrobatics in their homelands. 

At the school, Muslim and Christian students live in the same dormitory, sharing this space as their common prayer room to enshrine their Allah and God. African Muslim students also go to small local mosques regularly to perform Salah with local Chinese Muslims. Immersed in near solitude, only daily physical training and prayers set boundaries in body and spirit, as well as space and time, which become homogeneous and infinite. 

In this context, the school is like a factory: importing talent, contorting student bodies into more profitable forms, and then exploiting them. He’s video exposes a profound sense of rootlessness—amongst the movements of globalization, capitalism, individual identity, and the cultural past become burdensome, and ultimately disposable. These young African students, semi-willingly put under the constant pressure of being remolded, ground their realities in the monotonous cycle of training and praying, which appears to reify their bodies and—more importantly—their identities.