My digital video Chinese Utopia expresses my attitude and interpretation of certain social realities. During the process of China’s social modernization, our living environment has been filled with all kinds of social contradictions and cultural diversities. For example, the contrast between advanced technology and backward productivity ; the destruction of traditional buildings together the standardized urban expansion. At the same time, Chinese social system is undergoing a transitional period, which has presented us with a rather complicated and vividly conflicting picture : order and disorder, poverty and wealth, city and countryside, etc. This whole hybridity is hard to describe using only by words, while video, due to its special visual language, is the ideal instrument to record and disclose people and phenomena in real social and daily life under various circumstances. My work juxtaposes the “imaginary modernization” with the “Chinese-style utopia”. Enhanced by back ground music with an absurd flavor, it reinforces my structural analysis of social existence in China, and on a realistic base reflects the high future expectation of people from different strata. This is a scene where joy mingles with bitterness, and also an implied criticism and allegory of the existing issues.
