Shen Xin Explores Statelessness in East Asia

By Mark Rappolt

Shen Xin’s latest work, a five-channel video installation titled Brine Lake (A New Body) (2020), is, in part, about attempts to construct a narrative, or multiple narratives, out of materials that are absent. Although I wonder whether the fact that we are talking about the work via Skype, between Minnesota (Shen) and London (me), as, on one level, two absent presences, is further conditioning me to think this way. I wonder if people in general are not conscious enough about how these forms of communication, with their substitute presencing, alter our perceptions of what is ‘really’ present. Or maybe that’s just me. Which perhaps is a way of saying that I worry that I don’t worry enough about how social distancing and lockdowns might be affecting the way in which we perceive reality. About whether or not they lower our standards for and expectations of ‘reality’, make us immune to really thinking about what’s present and what’s not. Not that this wasn’t already happening before the current pandemic. Like many other issues, the pandemic just seems to have brought it to the fore.

“As witnesses of new technologies, it is certain that we will never remain unchanged,” says one of the protagonists in Brine Lake. Although she is, superficially at least, talking about technology in the context of something else.

Warm Spell , 2018, video installation, 34 min. Photo: GR. Berlin. © Times Art Center Berlin. Courtesy the artist

On Skype we begin by discussing pandemic living conditions. I mention the new restrictions that have been imposed in London to effect greater social distancing. Shen replies by saying that “we [in Minnesota] live in cars, so we don’t come into contact with other people”...READ MORE

Cover Image: Brine Lake (A New Body) (stills), 2020, five-channel video. Courtesy the artist