Zhou Tao

Zhou Tao shot Blue and Red in Thailand in 2014. It was a time when Thailand was experiencing rapid political changes, with antigovernment protesters and police violently confronting one another. The filmic outcome, however, is not a political or social documentary but expresses scenes of daily life in a poetic way. People’s faces stained blue by LED billboards in a large public square in the city and antigovernment protestors reveling all night take up a large part of the film. Wild, natural landscapes shot in South China are often inserted into the protest scenes, creating a contrast between the silence of nature and the loud confusion of the city. Zhou attempted to represent the emotional fluctuations he experienced in the filmmaking processes: “I wonder why I always submerge myself in a way of filming that’s like skimming the surface of the earth: leaving myself open to the shocks of the uncertain rather than following a script. I think of filming as a basic movement of our consciousness—at a time when everyone can take out his or her phone to film, we have all actually developed a new human reflex, along the lines of “thinking” or “seeing.” This act has become so ordinary that we almost neglect it: a new basic movement that allows us to evolve a new sensory antenna.”(Zhou Tao)

Chicken speaks to Duck, Pig speaks to Dog was created cooperatively with several suburban farmers, who all raise poultry and are good at mimicking the birds’ sounds. The artist invited the farmers to the city to show their talent for sound mimicry. They all mimic the sounds of chickens, ducks, pigs, and dogs, either standing or sitting on trees in a luxuriant park in the city. Another video shows some of them mimicking poultry sounds, sitting sparsely on the grass located in the immediate neighborhood of a skyscraper. The farmers’ mimicking sounds are as vivid as if they were recorded in nature. Those resonating sounds in a downtown city show an inexplicable sense of distance between the city and the countryside.