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Video Work

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Copyright Reserved @afish_bone

The Answer Lies in the Mud

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Media: 
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Sound Record: 
Wood Working: 
3 Channels Video Media Installation
10’10
2024

221 Desdor Studio

Kaiyu Wang
Xueyi Sun
Ruolin Liu

Sandberg Instituut Media Lab
Sandberg Instituut Wood Workshop
The Answer Lies in the Mud tells a story of a mud man who keeps being reshaped among the erased, past, and current queer narratives. The inspiration for the work comes from Kaiyu's reflections on the ongoing absence of a sense of security and belonging as a queer and Asian queer during different periods of life in China and Europe, as well as the dynamic tension between these identities.

In his work, Kaiyu is retrospecting and reconstructing the queer narratives in ancient Chinese mythologies, that were erased and then forgotten during the colonized invasion and the country’s modernization process.

Kaiyu sampled ancient gay sex paintings, news images, modern queer films, and gay porn, with these materials, and he hinted but powerfully constructed a queer narratives landscape. With the overlap and the reflection between ancient and modern queer narratives, Kaiyu not only conveys the confusion of being an Asian queer but also questions and challenges the white-centered Western queer narratives if there exists a mediator for Asian Queer in the gap of multiple layers of their local culture and the white-centered Western queer narratives.

Kaiyu invites the audience to enter the poetic space he constructs, wandering among the publication, shrine, and moving images. Underneath the muddy bodies, amidst the dust of history, within the walls of propaganda, lies another buried history, the unheard prayers, the unseen selves, and the wandering souls that are the intersectional experiences of queer people of color. Maybe, the answers of who we are already lie in the mud.