Essay Film
Poetics of Mycelium
Essay film, 4K, 16:9, 42:05 mins, 2025
Mycelial techniques embody a form of edge-centered wisdom, where perception and response arise from the margins, dissolving the need for centralized hierarchical structures. In the dystopian context of relentless human intervention in the biosphere, it becomes essential to reimagine planetary eco-politics through the living architecture of mycelial networks. This alternative political vision seeks to cultivate cross-species kinships and to de-anthropocentrize ecological thought, moving beyond frameworks that place humans at the center of the biosphere. It aspires to re-commonize interdependent relationships grounded in symbiosis, synergy, resilience, and multi-local responsiveness, offering an alternative to the prevailing systems of unilateral, monopolistic, and hierarchical eco-political dominance.
Is it possible for lightning to be disciplined?
Essay film, HD, 24:25 mins, 2024
In this essay film, artist Ma Yongfeng seeks to explore whether it is possible to re-establish a direct-democratic, alternative-political algorithmic model in place of the current algorithmic ideology and hierarchical order of technological oppression shaped by nation-state and multinational technological giants. Is it possible for lightning to be disciplined?simultaneously addresses this dystopian tendency while exploring how to reinvent different and innovative algorithmic resistances in our times. It asks: What ethical questions are raised by the algorithmic society? How can the democratization and decentralization of algorithms in the process of technological governance be achieved?
Video Art
The Swirl
15 mins 6 secs, Single channel video installation, 2002
featured in 13:Chinese Video Now at MoMA PS1,New York in 2006
The Swirl is a work that is as innocuous as it is brutal. In spite of its compositional simplicity and optical beauty, it is difficult to look at. The gaze is directed into the open drum of a washing machine that is loadable from above. In an uncut shot, we observe a 15-minute wash cycle. However, in the drum there are not brightly colored pieces of clothing, but six goldfish. The pointlessness of the torment and the helplessness of the tormented can be read as a metaphor for torture. But it may also be understood as social criticism and a cynical commentary upon the artist's existence, if one takes into consideration that the fish functions as a symbol for prosperity within Chinese culture. During the rapid transition from authoritarian communism to untrammeled capitalism, independence and distance from the mechanisms of the system continue to be difficult. Artists tell us of this experience, not least of all fostered by the recent boom of contemporary Chinese art in West.
Dorothée Brill
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Site-specific performance and installation, video documentation
20 metal drawers, each 38x30x10 cm, alcohol, 2018
During one of my personal projects at Organhaus, a project space in Chongqing, China, I arranged 20 specially customized metal drawers in a 4x5 configuration on the floor, poured each drawer full of locally produced high degree liquor, and then lit the contents of each drawer in a space that quickly rose to over 50 degrees Celsius in a matter of minutes.
Beijing Zoological Garden
27 mins, single channel video installation, 2004
dimension variable
Ma Yongfeng's recent video work Beijing Zoological Garden marks a departure from his earlier video pieces and moves into a realm that is more reflective. In this video Ma Yongfeng wanders with his camera through the Beijing Zoo filming the animals in their various enclosures. The film is shown as a circular image, as if through the lens of a camera obscura, and this emphasises the viewer's detachment from the scenes portrayed. As he drifts around the Zoo, Ma Yongfeng observes and records the movements of the animals and their spectators, creating a mysterious atmosphere that explores the artificial habitat of the animals in their man made shelters. Boundaries shift between animal and human. Man watches the animals, the animals watch man in an artificial environment in which species are saved from the excesses of the outside world.
David Thorp
Transparency is Wrong
1:30 min 3D animation, looped Dimension variable,2008
Ma Yongfeng’s new animation pieces take very mundane subject matter and transform them into seemingly heavenly objects, Transparency is Wrong is animation projection of flying circular objects, uniform in color and shape, only on closer examination does one realize these are overblown Chinese chess pieces floating endlessly in space, weightless and outside the temporal and spatial parameters of human life.
Storm Model
5 mins, Single channel video installation, 2005
In preparing this video work Ma Yongfeng spent several weeks working on a large model of a Chinese mountain village that is struck by a severe storm, complete with torrential rains, floods, and combining sound, and light effects. After the video was produced, Ma Yongfeng proceeded to destroy the installation. This work sets out to challenge the relationship between digital video, installation, and the common practice of model building, particularly by natural history museums. These man-made constructions represent mock-up residues of the real world, where people and animals are transported into the simulacra of the origin of species.
Thomas J. Berghuis
Confrontation Exercises
3 mins 25 secs, Single channel video installation, 2003
featured in 13:Chinese Video Now at MoMA PS1,New York in 2006
In this 3-minute video, sequences of a pair of naked butts, bumping together over and over again, are interpolated with bouncing orange ping pong balls. The balls have no discernible rhythm, but they fall with stubborn predictability. Over and over, the butts bump and the balls fall. That is all there is. Senseless, pointless, ceaseless, humanly-created conflict. There is no resolution, only impasse, hinting at the human being's stupidity and our stubborn insistence on embroiling ourselves in irresolvable conflicts.
Maya Kóvskaya
