Life tells lies (2017)
Harstad Cinema / screen 2
Artist in conversation with curator Kristian Skylstad after the screening programme.
Wearing the Fog
2-channel with sound
Duration: 13 mins 38 seconds,
2016 April，China
Brief synopsis:
‘Wearing the Fog’ is a double-screen video with a non-linear narrative structure. It circles around the cold of the industrial world and the indifference of a family. The video consists of multiple narratives that are told in a non-linear fashion.
It’s tragic that a lot of children are stuck in the deep influence from theirs parents and there is no place to hide. In the small Chinese town, the confrontations between two generations and rebellions of adolescences always happen under a very peaceful surface, though severe enough to separate a family. The way that the director approached it was to put two cameras in her home, through the re-enactment and record of contradictions within the family, to explore the impact of High-speed Urbanisation development on individuals. The director mix the feeling towards this severe reality and the understanding towards family life to show the gap between two generations, the estrangement between the father and the mother and the clash between individual and social development, all of which is enhanced and manifested through the use of double-screen.
Life tells lies
Duration: 11 mins
2017 July, China
Brief synopsis:
Performance & video, featuring an interaction between the artist and her mother over the course of several hours.
The work focuses on the social status of women and the wave of feminism surfacing in contemporary China in recent years. It discusses the conflict between traditional ideas of femininity and woman-hood, carried on from generation to generation in China, and contemporary feminism amongst young women.
The 2nd half of the dream
Duration: 4 mins 24 seconds
2019 June, Germany
Brief synopsis:
Sartre said: "Existentialism is a kind of humanitarianism." This kind of humanitarian thought has affected the development of contemporary art and the mainstream thought of adapting to the times. Nowadays, we are living in the social Internet era with multicultural life, the Internet has replaced people's thinking, social rules have replaced people's choices. It is more important than ever to think about who we are and how we are doing. For immigrants, these issues are even more complicated.
About the artist:
Photo: Kritian Skylstad
Born 1987 in China, lives and works in Berlin.
She is a filmmaker and video-artist. Yafei’s work examines the clashes between cultural norms & traditional values and the mindset of a globalising Chinese society.
After Yafei received her BA in Film- and Video-Art at the China Academy of Fine Arts in 2011, she graduated with a MFA from Bergen Academy of Art and Design (KHIB) in 2016.
Her 2016 piece ‘Wearing the Fog’ has been selected by various international films festivals and won —amongst other awards— “Best Experimental Film” at “The Broadway Film Festival” in Brooklyn, NY. In 2017, Honourable Mentioned at the FIRST International Film Festival in 2016. her performances “Life Tells Lies" and “I wonder why”, as well as the resulting video-works, received international acclaim. Since then, Yafei has had museum exhibitions in Bergen, Shenzhen and Beijing.