This #FilmFriday’s feature is Wu Chi-Tsung’s film, Still Life 012 - Buttercup Tree, 2019. Click the link below to watch on Vimeo for 24 hours from Friday, June 26 until Saturday, June 27. Join us on social media and tag @SeanKellyNY to share a pic of your at-home screening.
Wu Chi-Tsung’s body of work spans a wide variety of media, including photography, video, installation art, painting, and set design. Following a period spent creating experimental ink paintings he decided to transform them into video works. Wu Chi-Tsung’s Still Life series conceptually translates traditional cut-branch flower paintings into time-based moving images. This decision ultimately affected Wu’s entire creative process as he revisited the link between art, cultural tradition, and identity.
The films in his Still Life series are inspired by a cherished memory of painting. In speaking of these works, Wu stated, “Some nameless emotions and memories unconsciously and slowly dissipate until, to our surprise, they are far away and cloaked by a white mist, their appearances obscured. During the process of creating these works, I felt a slight sense of guilt, as if creating paintings so pleasing to the eye would be a betrayal of Eastern aesthetic pursuits and an act of despair. After all, this is just art that seeks to please the eyes, while contemporary art seeks to emphasize the concepts of innovation and subversion… We find ourselves continuously severing nourishment and comfort from our memories and cultural roots because we feel inferior, we wish only to become someone else. When we look back at those distant moods, they are still so moving; however, their beauty has long become foreign.”